Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Lego

Husband has been on a seemingly never ending Lego quest this week. It was the after Christmas quest to put some order back to chaos. We have spent far too much money over the last 5 years on Lego. It’s an easy fix for birthdays and Christmas for my son as he loves Lego and Star Wars and Indiana Jones. So the perfect combination is Lego Star Wars figures or space ships
Unfortunately, what seems to happen with Lego is that the space ships are made in an excited flurry on first receipt...then over the course of a few months, they are dropped and bits chip away and friends come to visit and decide that making your own models out of various bits of broken space ship is far more interesting than keeping the original bits together.
Eventually you end up with a pile of Lego in a box, which is fun and leads to hours of imaginative play but what happened to that great space ship?
Thankfully, we are a family with two semi control freak teachers, so we keep the instructions...
So husband has been using the instructions to gather up all those teeny weeny little bits of Lego from the box to recreate the space ships.
We did it last year too....
It’s arduous, takes hours and is satisfyingly wonderful when you manage to get a space ship back!
We’ve been colour coding this year...collecting all the black, dark grey, grey, white, red , brown and cream pieces into separate zip lock plastic backs (easier for finding pieces). Sounds simple doesn’t it? Until you get a bit compulsive about it all...we now have a zip lock bag for pieces of ‘men’ and accessories and another bag for ‘interesting and strangely shaped and transparent’ pieces that don’t necessarily fit into colour coding or ‘men’ accessories categories....
My son is in charge of putting the appropriate men together with the ships and he has a surprisingly good memory for which particular bits belong to each ship (they all look the same to me..)
We’ve turned into LEGO geeks.....
Spent the morning making a space ship today... and yesterday. I suppose that’s what holidays are for when you have young children. Next week will be back to work and normality without the luxury of hours of leisure time and the Star Wars figures will go back to their organic and natural decline back into Lego blocks. Meanwhile my daughter’s Playmobil is far easier to store and play with...although her animal menagerie from last Christmas could do with reconstructing again...

5 comments:

  1. What have I taken from this blog? Never buy Lego, only Playmobil.

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  2. Ha, ha! We are at exactly the same stage, with Andy about to invest in one of those massive tool boxes with sections for all yours nuts and bolts and bits and bobs and the Great Lego Division will begin!

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  3. "...semi control freaks" not sure you're being as honest with yourself as you could be there Sian!

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  4. Boops, you have two boys who will be getting closer and closer to Lego age, I don't think you can avoid it...especially not with a great aunt like me, who will deliberatley send you a very intricate lego for the boys for Christmas one year!

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  5. The Watkinsons have beaten the Jazrawy Browns and the Green-Davies to the ultimate lego organising system. Several, not just one, boxes for organising your nuts and bolts and bits and bobs. Zip lock bags, so last year. problem: two control freak teachers with different classification systems and lego pieces that defy classification into discrete categories. Sure, it's a "yellow, single twoer" but it has a hole in the middle for an axle. It can't really have a compartment all of its own but which other pieces are its closest cousins. Mapping the human genome is child's play compared to lego.

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