Friday 3 June 2011

For The Love of Lego


Signing up with Glowless and the gang for another Flog Yo Blog Friday!
Since we began our life without television the children’s indoor play activities have revolved mostly around fighting , lego and fighting about lego.
Lego has been gifted for Christmas’s and Birthdays for years now and they are starting to build up quite a collection of planes, police bikes and little ‘Ninja Warrior Dudes’ as Felix calls them.
This is the current state of Buzz’s floor:

Buzz is normally my tidy child and he was a tad unhappy to leave his room in this condition as he left for school today, but he absolutely has to get this plane finished this arvo to make sure “My brothers didn’t lose any bits!” when they borrowed it. To pack it away in the interim would apparently put him behind schedule.

When I was a child, lego came in buckets of assorted pieces with a couple of suggestive pictures on the front and we used that little thing called imagination to decide what we were going to build. We could create 1000 different things with just that one bucket.
As time has worn on, imagination in general seems to have worn off. Even the Lego company has cottoned on to the limited attention spans of today’s kids and developed carefully designed box sets with step by step instructions to quickly create a single masterpiece. These seem to have completely replaced the old tubs of coloured bricks from my youth.
Sure the finished helicopter looks great but it’s only a helicopter not a house and a car and a school and a spy head quarters. If just one piece goes missing you can’t build it anymore which leaves us more inclined to display them as dust collectors on a shelf rather than chuck all the bits back in the Lego tub for rebuilding the next day.

So while my kids are fighting about who lost who’s rotor blade I am on the hunt through ebay etc to find an old fashioned collection of basic coloured bricks and windows to try and re-stimulate their imaginations all the while silently acknowledging that my mother was right and I should have listened to her when she told my money hungry 13yr old self that I was being ripped off selling my 4 huge storage tubs of Lego for $200.
Do you remember the hours of fun that came from the original sets of Lego? 
 Want to join in Flog Yo Blog Friday? Pop over to Glowless' here and sign up!

3 comments:

♥.Trish.♥ Drumboys said...

WE love Lego too, just starting our collection again - we gave it away to a nephew before we knew we were having more .
I am here from FYBF.
I am moving to a large rural town soon and next door to a windmill.
The farm had a windmill but it's now broken & lying against a tree.
(new follower)

Fussy Eater's Mum said...

Yes, I grew up on that original, open plan version of Lego. We'd go to the annual Christmas LegoLand display at the city department store to get ideas of what we could build. My Darlings have combined their Lego house with their plastic farm animals to make Lego Farm. So there is still some creativity allowed.

Glow said...

We're just starting our Lego collection after a massive win from Trish at My Little Drummer Boys. Then Tricky got a massive stack of Duplo for his birthday! I think a combination of mostly generic pieces and a few spaceships/helicopters thrown in to the mix is a good thing :)