Gotta leggo control...

I can tell it's close to summer's end, because my Lego aversion is rearing its ugly head.

Ah, Legos...

I loved playing with them when I was a kid. I would build all kinds of things that looked like... well, like multi-colored brick boxes. Hey, I didn't say I built very CREATIVELY with them, just that I *did* build with them.

I think they CAN be wonderful learning tools. They can spark the imagination, and my son can spend hours building space ships and army platoons and railroads and tanks and racecars and... the list goes on and on.

And EVERY TIME he builds something new, he brings it to me to explain (often in excruciating detail) exactly how he made it.

And that he wants me to take a picture of it. And another of him holding it. And just ONE more 'from this angle'. I have an entire folder on the computer that is devoted to pictures of his Lego creations.

And those expensive Lego sets that come with the ridiculously detailed directions that would take me six weeks and a bottle of gin to finish? Well, the first time Davis built one, it took him about an hour. I was so impressed that I offered to glue the whole thing together piece by piece with Super Glue, so that he could play with it without worrying that it would come apart.

Wasn't that so thoughtful of me?? Yeah, I thought so, too.

Huge waste of my time and Super Glue, I discovered. Because while he LOVES the expensive sets, and loves building them... he also loves taking them apart.

I'm always cringing when I see that he has disassembled that $60 (oh yes... you must not have priced Star Wars Lego sets recently!) Starfighter that he spent a Saturday afternoon building.

The organization junkie in me has tried labeling Rubbermaid containers for the different sets... tried to encourage him to keep the pieces together... tried to not be driven to the edge of insanity by all the Legos I discover that look like it 'could potentially be the ship's control panel' or 'the arm of a Clone Trooper'...

I've given up.

Turns out, he enjoys making his own Lego creations even more than the packaged sets. (He still wants all the fancy pieces that come in the kits, mind you!)

I just keep telling myself that someday he'll probably be a structural engineer. And that when I step on them, or find them in the guinea pig cage,or they get stuck in the vacuum cleaner, that this...






will all be worth it. ;)