yesterday afternoon, i helped h put together his lego bionicle playset. that is, if by "helped" you mean "put the whole thing together while child and kittens fiddled with the plastic bits." have ANY of you taken on a large scale lego project in your lives? it is eye-straining, back-spasming tedium. i've put together piles and piles of the actual bionicle robots, they're very easy and very playable once they're built. you can even take them apart and interchange the parts into your own cool new robot creation! wow. but this playset, this was a whole different story. there were about 15 little plastic baggies in the set, each filled with a few hundred shiny, colorful lego building blocks in diffrent sizes and shapes. what they don't tell you on the exterior of the package is that THERE IS ONLY ONE OF THE PIECE YOU NEED, and that YOU HAVE TO FIND IT AMONG THE 20,000 OTHER PIECES.
oh, honestly. h was trying to help me find the appropriate piece per the instructions, if by "trying" you mean messing around with the kittens. usually i could find what i needed, but occasionally it would take 10 minutes to locate the small, flat, red, square, four-nubbed piece necessary to build the ENTIRE rest of the structure. one time, i asked h to go upstairs and get his basic box of legos so i could substitute an unfound piece, and he said, "i'm too sick!" my reply? "then i'm too sick to build the rest of this castle!" (i'm not normally so snotty, but this was after at least 3 hours of legoing. my patience was running thin.) he slunk off the chair and plodded, head down, toward the stairs when i shouted, "FOUND IT!" boy, was he relieved not to put in the effort of 14 stairsteps.
the end result was... i would use the word "breathtaking..." but it was really just underwhelming. all that work? all those itty bitty pieces? for THIS?! h enjoyed playing with the built set until it slowly began to fall apart from playing with it. that's right, folks, FALL APART. from PLAYING. with a TOY. then orion knocked over the towers. then it was bedtime.
it's still on the kitchen table today, and my question is, what to do with it? i can semi-dismantle it and place it in a box, but will it ever again be rebuilt? will it get played with in a semi-built mode? will it crumble into it's original state of a zillion pieces disconnected? but most importantly... what was the point?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
That sounds gruelling. I think I would have told son that he had to wait for his dad to help him with such a project. So pat yourself on the back for being such a good mother.
That sounded like a lot of work! I have to admit that putting together those little itty bitty lego things make my eyes water. I guess the best thing to do would be to dismantle it. Maybe he might want to reconstruct it again later.
Oh, I'm glad you tried the holiday martini. I hope it was good. I still haven't had one yet. Maybe on New Year's Eve. :)
um, quality time with the kids? i think that is the point, but it sounds like it wasn't the case. maybe legos should be marked off santa's list.
Whoa, that was a lot of effort only to have it fall apart! You're a good mom to have taken so much trouble to build it, Melissa, I don't think I'm blessed with that kind of patience!
Sorry, and I know this is blasphomy (sp), but I kinda think leggos suck. You've done nothing to change my mind on this. My brother LOVES them. I'll send him over to help out next time h wants to build something.
I have been there...the only thing missing was the kittens!
And I thought putting together my son's Bionicle was hard. DANG!
Did you at least take a picture before it fell apart?
oh, booklogged, i only wish that my husband was the "building" type. that usually falls to me in this partnership! also, he has no interest (mostly) in sports.
beenzzz-- it's going in a box today! he can put it back together in his own room, i'm tired of it on the kitchen table.
mr l-- it'll only get worse as he gets older, unless he can figure out how to assemble them himself-- correctly. the worst is when h tries to do it himself and i have to take it all back apart because it's not right.
angela-- yes! quality time with the kids! it's what i strive for each day.
lotus-- see, you didn't have boys. instead, i'm sure you were plagued with barbie dreamhouses or something equally as frustrating.
j-- i think they fairly well suck, too. every weekend of my childhood i was awakened to my big brother scraping through legos, looking for JUST the right piece. wish i lived closer to either him OR your brother!
andie-- i made h put together 2 new bionicles he bought with christmas $ yesterday. he was in tears before it was over! i'm hoping it gave him a new appreciation for the 50 or so i've put together.
Ah, the gifts that keep on giving. You'll be feeling that one in your lower back for days on end.
Happy new year.
Post a Comment