Sunday, July 1, 2012

No More Lego Kits!

I think I'm going to make it my rule from now on - no more buying Lego kits for M. Sure, there are some awesome kits out there and we do have quite a few at home. But so far playing with kits has been way too frustrating and not nearly as rewarding as playing with loose bricks. 

I recently ordered bulk Lego bricks from Ebay. To supplement those I just bought an inexpensive (as far as anything Lego goes) set of 600 bricks (if you're interested, it's set #4628). With these two new acquisitions, M's been building stuff every day.

When it comes to kits, even fairly simple ones, he gets put off by directions. Even though he can follow directions reasonably well, he gets intimidated and requires too much hand-holding. With loose Legos he just builds, frequently early in the morning when I'm still asleep.

Not to mention that loose bricks let him build just about anything he imagines. Lately he's been building a rocket with a launch pad, a police station with a prison (after watching Lego Police episodes on YouTube), a truck to move "everything in the world", a bunch of satellites, a super cell phone and much more.

Finally, keeping Lego kits organized has proved to be a nightmare. I recently got several tiered plastic drawers on casters and put each kit into a separate drawer. Naively, I thought it was going to work out just perfectly. Yeah, if you have a Lego-builder in your house, you're laughing at me now, I know. After just one week after this organizing "stroke of genius", half our Lego kits miss small, but absolutely essential and hard-to-get parts. Loose bricks will definitely help me with this issue.

I still have to find or re-order the missing pieces. And I still have to come with a way to store the kits so they are accessible, but manageable. But hopefully M's building activities will be a bit less taxing on my obsessive-compulsive idea of "a place for everything and everything in its place".
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3 comments:

  1. GabrieleJuly 2, 2012 at 7:36 PM

    I gave up on the idea of keeping kits together as well :P I actually just got L some of those nut/bolt sorting bins from Lowes (or Home Depot) and we sort them by piece type in them. It works SO much better and makes it SO easy when he's looking for a specific piece.
    Some stuff is mixed together, but for the most part, all the pieces have their own bin! I have a pic of it on Facebook I will tag you in so you can see it!

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  2. YelenaJuly 2, 2012 at 7:40 PM

    Yep, I had the same idea about using these bins, but M decided to use them for his "collection of everything" instead :) Yeah, I'd love to see how you deal with L's legos.

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  3. Natalie PlanetSmartyJuly 12, 2012 at 6:46 AM

    We also prefer loose bricks, but when we have kits, we usually disassemble them and store with plastic zipper bags together with their instructions. Anna knows that she is not supposed to mix and match them with other parts, she has enough loose special parts from her father's childhood of Lego building. He brought over 3 suitcases of Lego blocks from Germany!

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