I remember when my husband walked in the door carrying a dilapidated coffee table that had seen better days—in the 1960s. He (shockingly) found it on the side of road and deemed it as "having potential."
It just looked like a rickety wooden structure to me. The only potential I saw was as kindling.
And yet my sister and father came over one day, peeked at the coffee table banished to the back porch, and nodded in agreement: potential. (At this point I cocked my head to the side and stared at it like one of those optical illusion pages that you slowly back away from. What was I missing here?)
Off it went to my father's house for a Top Secret Birthday Gift for Noah. He was turning 2 years old in a couple of weeks, and my sister and father had just the DIY project. And on the day of Noah's 2
That they made.
My father reinforced the garbage-bound table with more wood (even making a shelf for handy toy-storage baskets, which made my organization-loving heart skip a beat) and glued down some of Noah's wooden train tracks on the top. He even made magnetic boards on either side of the table. My sister modge-podged kid-friendly paper onto the wooden train table, and then made magnets to match.
And he hasn't stopped playing with it ever since.
