Sunday, January 16, 2011

Succeeded in my goal to play more Legos with my kids!

Here's to starting with the funnest goal!



Somehow my kids have seemed to have acquired an uncountable number of Legos. I think Christmas accelerated the process. The trouble with Legos? They tend to leave droppings all over the house. Then, if you succeed in gathering them all into one place, it's impossible to find the piece you want or to get an overview of what pieces you have to play with.

So, to get maximum playtime out of these maddening little bits of plastic, I sorted them. I spent the whole day Saturday at it, and I sorted them all. I bought a whole series of various-sized tupperwares, and sorted the Lego bits into thirty-seven different categories.

In theory, the kids were supposed to clean up the rest of their room while I did the Legos, but that plan had one fatal flaw -- once Legos are sorted even partially they are irresistible to play with! So the kids re-built a bunch of their old sets, and built some more that they found instructions for on the Internet, and even invented some of their own.

Naturally, I could not resist the temptation myself. I wanted to try out some of these "Lego Heroes" bits that we certainly didn't have when I was a kid. (Seems like in the olden days, we just built simple stuff like castles.) In particular, I wanted to see if it was possible to build something out of the hero pieces that wasn't obviously a Lego Hero. Here's what I came up with:



It seems like these pieces mostly lend themselves to making monsters, so I decided to go with that. Also note, I made the head out of bits that I think were from some sort of boat.

What do you think? Doesn't it make you want to have 7-to-10 year old kids, so you can have an excuse to play with toys? ;^)

3 comments:

Stephen said...

My legos super daughter said "looks cool"

Joe said...

Great builds!

Legos is one of the greatest toys ever invented. The first small legos were ones I had when I was a kid! We now have several containers of them, waiting for the granddaughter to get old enough. (We gave up sorting them long ago.)

JentheHumanist said...

Most excellent construction. Looks really cool. I gave up on organizing. And also gave up on trying to keep the pieces in one general part of the house. We have one huge tub and most everything goes in there. The only nod to organization is I do have a seperate tub for lego people and their horses and camels etc. The only thing that is organized is the instruction books which are all basically in one place. But we almost never take them out as my son is a free form builder. In fact, I don't think any construction made new lasts more then a day before he gets a better idea of how it should go together.