Thomas and the Rubik's Cube

He did it!  Thomas solved the Rubik's cube!  He solved it 5 days after getting it in his stocking for Christmas.  He was literally not focused on anything else for those 5 days.  As a mother, you always get invited to participate in the child's obsession, so of course I was involved quite a bit at the beginning, sitting down and reading about algorithms and working through them with him, finding appropriate youtube videos that could help him, and listening as he showed me over and over how he almost solved it and why he thinks he didn't.  By the way, before this experience, I never knew there was a real method to the cube madness with algorithms!  After hours of this, his efforts became more independent and every time we saw him, he was reading his Rubik's cube book or watching the videos.  He sat through a few movies, family read alouds, etc. with the cube always in his hand, twisting and turning (driving us all a little crazy with that as our background noise) using every minute he could to solve it.  And solve it he did!  The pics below show his reaction right after he did it!  There was screaming, jumping up and down, and a victory dance of sorts.  Then the Elders came over that night for correlation meeting and dinner and he solved it a few more times.  They were wonderful cheerleaders for him!  Here's Thomas, holding the newly solved cube and the Elders cheering.  :)

Briant and I are really proud of him.  I think we all recognize that it is no small feat to solve the Rubik's cube.  Briant and I both remember trying to solve it by taking the stickers off and moving them around.  Thomas is a better person than we are. :)  He's definitely more determined.  Or should we say that his OCD kicked in.  I love his passion for problem solving and his determination to be a problem solver.  This talent will definitely come in handy during his lifetime!

Now that he's solved it, he's actually playing around with it, seeing what patterns of colors and designs he can make on all sides at the same time.  He says that he likes to try and make up his own "problems" on the cube and then solve them.  Of course all of the algorithms have been memorized so now he's basically making up his own.  And of course his goal now is to solve the cube in a matter of seconds.  I think the record is something like 5.55 seconds.  Right now he's doing it in less than a minute so he just wants to keep improving his time.  It's funny how excited you can be for someone when you know how hard they've worked on something and you've tried supporting them through it.  I cheered when he walked as a baby for the first time, but I'm pretty sure this cheer was much louder! 

Sadly, just as I was finishing this post, Thomas got home from school and said that his Rubik's cube got stolen as he was packing up to come home.  Guess this is his chance to buy a different cube to challenge him, like the 2x2 or 4x7.  It will take a few weeks to get here though.  We'll see if he can survive the wait. :)