We have two children age 6 (Boy) and 3 (Girl). Both like Lego, but my son, Boy is obsessed with them. It started innocently enough. First a couple of Duplo sets when the boy was smaller. Then a couple Lego Junior sets. Typical Lego City stuff like construction vehicles and police cars. A couple of Disney sets for Girl. Then Lego Movie sets. Then Lego Jurassic World. Then Ninjago. I won a mini Lego Millennium Falcon (about the size of a baseball…not the this monstrosity, thank the Force) at conference so I gave it to Boy.
For fun, I even bought a set of custom minifigures at the local Lego Store that looks like our family.
For a little while there was a bit of tension (not unlike Will Farrell’s relationship with his son in The Lego Movie) between trying to keep the sets intact vs Boy’s interest in creating his own builds.
Then when Girl started developing an interest, there was a bit of tension (not unlike the brother / sister relationship in The Lego Movie 2) with them playing together and sharing each other’s sets. He gets an Emmitt. She wants an Emmitt. She gets a Wildstyle. He wants a Wildstyle. So on and so forth.
For better or worse, both those problems were solved when we went to a yard sale and happened across someone selling a massive set of Lego for like $90. Like half a dozen 2-gallon Ziploc freezer bags full, or roughly half of one of those 70 quart Home Depot storage bins (so…about 10-12 gallons of Lego). Basically enough random Lego bricks for a small Boy and his father (a former Civil Engineer who also enjoyed Lego as a kid) to basically build a city covering both the kitchen table and a separate play table (for Girl).
My wife told me she overheard one of our neighbors mention “a kid in the building has an awesome Lego collection!” “Do you think he was talking about our apartment?” she asked. No, it’s probably someone else who lives on the ground floor who has a dinosaur and a mech-warrior robot fighting on a six story Lego tower crane next to a post modern skyscraper that doesn’t quit fit with the classic pan-Asian Ninjago aesthetic of the neighborhood.
Where I’m the Head of Engineering, my wife has become our VP of Procurement. Scouring sites like Bricklinks.com to find the best deals on specific sets or minifigures the kids want. She has also become quite the connoisseur.
And of course, because everyone knows my son loves Lego, that’s what everyone gets him for gifts.
I’m getting a bit concerned though as Christmas is almost here. My wife also has a bit of an enabling personality and no sense of spatial relationships. For his birthday, she bought Boy some sort of Lego sky-pirate ship that looks like some sort of steampunk mashup of a V-22 Osprey and a Catalina flying boat. And it’s the size of a Lego city block.
I have a feeling I’m in for a long weekend of building Disney Castles and Jungle Explorer Adventure Sets and then trying to fit them in an already overcrowded Legoscape.
