Learning to Lego

In the days B.C. (Before Children), I always hated buying gifts for kids of my acquaintance. If you’re not around them every day, it’s hard to conceptualize what kids of a certain age like, or are like, much less a specific individual child.

I had all manner of toys when I was a kid, but I really only played with three of them:

• My baseball glove & ball (best part of being a preacher’s kid – living next to the church whose immense brick wall provided the backstop for endless hours of throwing and fielding);
• My baseball cards;
• And my Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars and track.

So when in doubt for a gift, I always went with the cars.

I took that one step further with my own kids – not only did I give them cars to play with, I gave them my own cars… my entire childhood collection, in not mint but pretty good condition. And my track, into the bargain.

They have their “own” cars, which live at home, and they get to visit “my” cars, which live at camp. The pain I feel watching those cars smashed together (a new experience for them, since even as an 8-year-old I was a bit of a fussbudget), or lose little parts I’ve preserved for 30-plus years, is more or less balanced by the joy of sharing not only an interest but also literally a toy.
I also like to get them baseball cards, incidentally… which they enjoy in a fairly mindless, “Hey look, I can collect something with a picture on it” kind of way. And I have carefully preserved that childhood collection as well… but ain’t no way they’re ever getting their paws on those.

It’s funny, because I always thought they’d enjoy MegaBloks as well, even though my own record with building toys was, shall we say, spotty. I had TinkerToys – that was so long ago that they were carved out of whalebone, I believe – and Lincoln Logs, but I never really succeeded in building anything that looked like a structure. When you combine “not overly mechanically inclined” with “no imagination”, you get, “I’m sorry… what is that supposed to be?”

Nonetheless I brought forth the MegaBloks, and the Duplos, figuring that somehow despite the lack of role-modeling (and please don’t say, “Daddy, can you build something?” Because I can’t), Hours of Family Fun would ensue. Sad to say, aside from my son building the occasional tower (so he could smash it), not so much.

And then one day a well-meaning soul gave each of my kids a little Lego kit that could be assembled into a car. Our 5-year-old was fascinated; but as it turns out, this sort of activity has the same effect on an 8-year-old as crack does on a somewhat different slice of the populace. Then for his birthday, he got one of the giant Lego kits – featuring, and I can only wish I were making this up, not only Batman and several bad guys, but an ambulance and an honest-to-goodness insane asylum.

What’s worse, I am completely closed off from employing my trademark “exaggeration for comic effect” and writing that the set contains more than 800 pieces, many no larger than your fingernail… because that is, in fact, the case. As I understand it, adult Lego enthusiasts – there’s probably a cute made-up noun like Legoists to describe these, um, hobbyists – usually have elaborate filing systems to keep track of all the many different colors & shapes in use. I imagine they also have powerful lights and even magnifiers available; one of the curses of the later-in-life parent is the demands presented by tiny, intricate toys and other kid items (see my recent screed on hair accessories) at that point in life when age-related myopia has begun its grim, inexorable march.

And this is exacerbated by the fact that toy-assembly directions, like virtually all assembly directions of this millennium, are completely devoid of any verbiage. It’s all diagrams, which in the case of Lego schemata consist mostly of trying to figure out whether we need the dark gray piece with the 2 little knobby things (what are those called?) or the light gray, not-as-thick piece with the 2 little knobby things, and which row & column position of the previously-assembled layer it should be carefully affixed to – don’t press too hard or we’re back to a little pile of dark grays and light grays and….

But fear not, if we can find all the pieces called for (not under the bed or up the vacuum or… maybe left out of the box to begin with?); and if I can keep my dark gray 2s and my black 4s straight; and if I don’t poke an eye out trying to get the pieces close enough so I can see to assemble them; and if we can set aside an hour or so a day to work on this project; and if he doesn’t keep getting frustrated with the detailed & even tedious work and throwing them… my hope is that sometime before the school year is over we’ll have a fully-assembled Asylum! Won’t the grandparents be proud?