Legos

It's time to blog again about Legos. Why? Because the blog is about how the children spend their time and Legos are a big time expenditure currently. I mentioned before that Matt started hauling his huge Lego collection out of storage. Legos took over the upstairs family room. When Kara couldn't handle it any more she purchased bins that roll under the toy table (two years ago she purchased reversible Lego/Duplo mats which cover the entire table surface). Did the new bins solve the problem? It's looking better, but the Legos have a tendency to sprawl if not ruthlessly corralled.

The boys drag Matt up to the family room as often as they can. It's no hardship since he, like B & J, thinks Legos are the best toy ever. He built a big castle for them. He told me how many hours it took and I hope he was exaggerating.

Both Bentley and Jake build models following the building instructions (visual diagrams) in Matt's old Lego booklets. Fortunately Matt kept a lot of the specialty sets in separate storage containers (they were not thrown into one container), so it's not totally impossible to find the needed pieces, just somewhat challenging. It's like putting together a large jig saw puzzle. Some people enjoy the search, some hate it.

B & J sometimes make up their own designs, too. The boys are building larger and larger items. They recruit everyone in the family to help them find the needed piece(s) or to figure out the diagrams. They can do most of it themselves, but they like a little help now and then. They like to show off their work, too, so periodically we are asked to go up and admire how much more they've completed.

Sometimes the help is not very good. One afternoon Jake wanted me to help him finish the boat he was building. He showed me a building diagram and asked for my help. I looked at the diagram and I looked at his boat in progress and I told him he had a piece placed wrong. He insisted he didn't. I was sure he did since he had a smooth flat piece where I needed to plug in the next piece. He was adamant that the smooth piece belonged there. He flipped through the diagram booklet to find the diagram showing the smooth flat piece. He was right. That smooth piece went there. I left him to ponder the next step. It was beyond my interest level. Opa came home for lunch and helped him piece it together. The window was supposed to be unplugged on the bottom so it could hinge out giving access to inside the cabin. I didn't expect that since I've never seen a boat with cabin access through the front window.

To redeem myself, later that afternoon I helped Jake locate a piece he wanted. It was a little green translucent square. I tried to talk him into using a green translucent column instead, but he said it had to be a square. Bentley is just as picky. He said he couldn’t use a white bench because it had Shell written on it. I thought about getting some remover to take the word Shell off, but then what would happen when he built the item that needed the Shell seat? He'd never find it. That'd be traumatic.

One day Jake played Legos for eight hours. It was last week when great-grandma was in the hospital and life was a little stressful for the adults. If the temperamental four year old wanted to quietly play Legos in the upstairs family room, we were happy that he was happy while we dealt with the current crises. Bentley was with him for most of the day, but took some time off to read to us. Occasionally we have tears or temper tantrums when we drag the boys away from their Lego projects. They insist they haven't had enough time--even if it's been hours and hours that day.

Here is a photo of the Lego table, graveyard for past Lego creations:


Here is Jake working on his boat. He's looking for pieces in the storage bin:


Here is Bentley working on his police station:


Lincoln is too little to play with Legos. He enjoys watching his brothers and playing with the Duplos.


We're going to have problems keeping Lincoln out of the Legos when he's more mobile. I hope he's a fast learner and decides to leave them alone and play with the duplos. Keeping Legos out of his reach would be very, very difficult. We'd pretty much have to ban him from the upstairs family room.

I finally managed to acquire a photo of Viva with one of her Lego creations. I don't see her play with Legos very often, but her mom said that she joins the boys maybe one out of four times when they play. She doesn't play as long as they do. Kara was not a big Lego fan growing up. She had a bin of Legos, but guests used it more than she did.