Photo by Simon Dawson : BloombergI am a fan of toys that allow a kid to create and when it came time to spend the birthday money my kid received this year we opted for more Legos. They are like crayons or Play-Doh; you can never have too much. There are only 38 Lego stores in the United States and one of them happens to be at Baybrook Mall in Friendswood. I believe it is also the only place where you can buy a set of regular old assorted Legos that aren’t supposed to be built into any specific fire station or pink horse barn.
Sometime in between my childhood and my daughter’s, Legos started coming with instructions and special parts like flag poles, computers and curved windows. My daughter puts the sets together and then they become the bane of my existence, not because I am stepping on the tiny bits like my own mother did, but because they must stay put together on the floor, forever like little museum pieces. There was hell to pay when I bumped the pizza joint with the vacuum cleaner and the second floor came apart.
No longer do I see the jagged roofs of crazy colored adobes and Escher-esque stairs leading to nowhere among what the kid builds, instead there are concentrated stares at the instruction booklet and frustrated cries of “Arg! I can’t find the orange one with two circles and a flat side!” I’m not happy about it and soon I will opt to be the worst Mother ever when I take them all apart and put them into the tub. I will throw the instructions away and perhaps as penance I will take her back to the store and buy her a pound of assorted colors that don’t come with instructions.
My husband is in total disagreement. He thinks being able to follow a set a plans correctly is great. But he works in construction and I’m an artist so hopefully it’ll balance out when our daughter becomes an astronaut or the President or both.