Do you ever wonder how Legos multiply? As a mother of 2 boys,
I wonder about this all the time. I am starting to think that Legos are a
distant relative of rabbits. Legos are a great toy, they really do bring out
creativity in children and teach them how to follow directions while while
developing their fine motor skills.
However, at 10:30 at night when you step on a stray Lego in
your barefeet, you tend to forget how wonderful they are! Our cat, Smokey, likes to bat around
the heads of Lego characters- nothing like hearing bing, bing, bing against the
hard wood floors at 2:00 in the morning. Love how she also chooses the heads;
she is a little sinister!
A few years ago I had spent several months redoing the
basement into a playroom. There is (maybe I should say was) a strict rule of
“all Legos must stay downstairs.” Then it started, “Mom can I just bring up
Zane (one of the Lego Ninjagos which we have at least 10 of that one
character).” “Mom, Zane is lonely up here, we need to bring Kia, Cole, and Jay
up.” My nice, clean, well-decorated living room now looks like a Lego store.
How does that happen? I know I can’t be only parent that experiences this, right?
The other day, as part of a school project, my
kindergartener had to bring in 100 items of something for the 100th
day of school. We were all sitting down at that table for diner when I
suggested that he should bring in Legos as we had at least a thousand down
stair. My 3rd grader look at me with disgust and said that he has 2
Lego sets that were at least 1000 pieces each so we have much more than 1000. I
stared dumbfounded at my husband who just nodded. I had mentioned this to one
of my friends, who suggest a great snow day project, would be to have the boys
count them all. I may just do this… it could keep them busy for days.
LegoLand in Florida has a section called Mini USA which is a
series of cities recreated using 300 Million Legos. I am starting to think that
we have that many hang around our house.
I will keep you posted on the snowday activity and how many
we have…
If you want, you can cheat a bit to figure out how many bricks you have:
ReplyDeleteRegister for a free account on BrickSet (http://brickset.com/mycollection). Collect all of the instruction books, enter the set numbers into the BrickSet site, and mark them as "owned". Then go to the "my collection" section of the site and the site will calculate how many bricks you own, the number of minifigures that you own, and the approximate retail value of your collection. (Retail value being the price that you paid, not what they're worth - they may be worth more depending on which sets you have!)
After recovering from shock, the next step for most folks is to try to buy stock in Lego - until they realize that you can't since it's still a family-owned business!
Granted, collecting all of the instruction books and using the site won't occupy as much of the kids' time, but it's probably a more achievable goal that leads to the same end result. :)
While we're on the topic of Lego sets, here's another tip: remember to use the prices on Lego.com as the benchmark for MSRP. Toys R Us prices tend to be over MSRP! As a general rule, try to get "easy to find" sets for 10 cents a brick or less (the brick counts are generally listed prominently on the boxes).
Happy building!