You have done everything you could to avoid the painful step on a Lego piece with a bare foot, but the Lego dilemma doesn’t end there. Even if you (like me) have never stepped down hard on a Lego brick in the dark in the middle of the night on the way to the refrigerator to get a glass of water, there is more work to be done with Legos.
Don’t get me wrong. Legos are a wonderful educational hands-on activity for kids of all ages! Love these things. Kids love them. They are satisfying and therapeutic, with easy and reasonable instructions that you never have to throw across the room (unlike IKEA instructions with that annoying useless little man who instructs you to call a number if you get stuck that sends you into phone tree hell). Legos are a great activity for parents and kids since the instructions are so easy to do that a parent can have a cocktail in one hand and make sense of page 7 in the other hand without ever having to get up off from the couch.
And while there are those times when little ones will need to reverse engineer their creation (in angry tears and possibly a few thrown Lego pieces) to rework a part that set the whole bloody thing off track, this, too is a great learning opportunity.
So what’s the problem? Nothing. Really. Until you realize that you have empty Lego box upon empty box with the instructions inside stuffed under the coffee table. Or maybe you have a plastic bag with the pieces of a particular kit along with the instructions (if you are that dang organized type of parent with time on their hands to take the thing apart and put it all in a gallon size plastic bag). You may have a giant basket of all Lego pieces all mixed together like one giant colorful Lego soup or little containers of pieces in plastic containers all organized by color.
What do you do with all of this crap?
Here’s how it goes down. Your kid gets a new Lego set for Christmas. She opens it up and does the entire thing in an hour or two. Done. Now you have an empty box, a Lego creation built, and your kid is wandering out of the room asking to use your phone.
See, that’s it: $50-ish for about two-ish hours of entertainment and then what? You get more for their birthday, Christmas, and the inventory increases… more pieces, more plastic, to the point where you question your purpose for life itself. We all were that parent that said, “We are not going to have toys all over the place.” How do those words taste now? Add a little salt and pepper, melted cheese … and get used to the toy parade that begins to march into your home (uninvited) come the first birthday. It’s all toy downhill from there. You are going to be make trip after trip to Good Will and cuss out loud (regardless of whom is in the car) when you see the sign that says they are “not currently accepting any donations.” This, after you had to sneak all of those tired and no longer used toys in to the bag as your kid looked the other way.
But I digress. No, there is no answer. As I said this is a dilemma.
—SBM
Single Busy Mommy 