2023, Family, Kids, Uncategorized

Lego Madness

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Oh, the things I learn from my kids!

Our daughter has been very excited his past week to be playing with Legos. She is an adult. I had no idea there were Lego sets for grownups, but daughter found a store that sells them and has been assembling them as a relaxing hobby in the evenings. You can see one she put together in the header photo. Her most recent purchase is below. Lego has an entire line of kits for people 18 years or older.

She says there is a kit for a large replica of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings for $600. That one is out of her price range but it is tempting. I don’t know how she keeps her cats away from them but she says they leave the completed designs alone if she puts them on her bookshelf. I don’t remember having Legos as a child, but I liked building with wooden blocks and Tinker Toys.

What were your favorite building materials in childhood? What would you like to see Lego offer as a grownup project?

23 thoughts on “Lego Madness”

  1. You would be hard put to come up with a Lego kit that doesn’t already exist. One that surprised me was a recreation of the studio set for the comedy Friends.

    My grandkids are all Lego enthusiasts but my oldest granddaughter in particular. We have done our share of Lego shopping. We took her to the Lego store at the Mall of America on her birthday. I took her last Spring to a Lego convention out in the suburbs. It was packed and dominated by adult builders.

    We have a Lego gingerbread house that we assemble every holiday season with the grandkids. It has about 1000 pieces and takes a couple of hours. (It takes longer than that to disassemble it in an orderly fashion.)

    There are also virtual Legos, some of which are apparently free that one can use to build online. I remember reading about a local man who had built replicas of several neighborhood taverns, both inside and out, out of virtual Legos.

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  2. There were never Legos at our house when I was a kid but I do remember wanting Lincoln Logs and never getting them. I also never got matchbox cars that I wanted. I really don’t know if this is because we just didn’t have a lot money for excess toys or if it was because I was a girl and my folks thought Lincoln Logs and matchbox cars were a boy things.

    When YA was little we inherited some Duplos from the kids up the street but YA wasn’t interested them in them at all. There was never an interested Legos either.

    A friend of mine gave me a set several years back. If I’m remembering correctly, it was the set of the Big Bang Theory. When I took it out, it was clear it was going to take much longer than I had anticipated. That coupled with a thought of what would I do with it once I was done made me give it to Value Village. I hope someone who likes Legos enjoyed it!

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    1. I had Lincoln Logs, which were invented by a son of Frank Lloyd Wright, but there wasn’t much one could do with them other than building a log cabin. I also had tinker toys and a building set like legos except the blocks were wood. Probably the building set I spent the most time with was an Erector set, with which one could construct mechanical contraptions.

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  3. There are no boys in my immediate family but we girls had Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and an Erector set. I loved playing with all of them. I don’t remember if we had a set of wooden building blocks. My grandnephews were huge fans of Legos – that made birthday and Christmas shopping for them very easy. But now they are madly into soccer. I might enjoy the adult Lego sets. But as BIR said, what would I do with them once done? So I’ll stick with jigsaw puzzles.

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  4. We had Tinker Toys, and a set of wooden blocks my dad made, painted red and yellow (same colors he painted our sled). He taught high school shop, so had access to the equipment.

    I loved playing with Legos at other kids’ houses, though, and remember helping put together some of the kits Joel had. I kept a small set for kid visitors until just a few years ago, when we moved.

    I’d like a Lego kit of something manageable – how about the 16-foot trailer we lived in for those three summers of my dad’s grad school?

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    This week I am making things from polymer clay. I played with building blocks as a little one. It was fun to build them high, then knock them down. My son played with legos and duplos from the youngest age possible, building anything he wanted to. HIs engineering skills were evident even then.

    When I was training social workers the male social workers were restless and hard to cope with. I brought legos for them to fidget with. Usually they would build walls around themselves on the table and by the end of 3-5 days I could hardly see them. REally interesting.

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  7. I did the Tinker Toy thing a little, but I was far more interested in building model planes, cars, and ships. My “masterpiece” was the USS Constitution. Took me a loooong time to finish, but I saved it for a long time. I think it got tossed before one of my wife’s and my many household moves early in our marriage.

    I saw a bit on TV about a boy who builds “entire cities.” Not sure what that entails, but he did some historical village from hundreds of years ago, mentioned wanting to build a Williamsburg, VA, replica, and I think mentioned Manhattan (or maybe all of NYC).

    I think it might be fun to build a Lego version of one of the great chateaus in Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, wherever). We visited several in France on a trip and they are indeed impressive structures.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  9. On yesterday’s Jeopardy! one of the contestants was a Lego enthusiast. Both his tie and his breast pocket handkerchief were made from Legos. He admitted they were a little stiff and uncomfortable to wear, especially the tie, I imagine.

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    1. There are more practical ways to express that enthusiasm:

      https://www.etsy.com/listing/1478431012/building-blocks-primary-colors-100?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_d-craft_supplies_and_tools-fabric_and_notions-fabric&utm_custom1=_k_Cj0KCQjwj5mpBhDJARIsAOVjBdo-E2WotmxE-DRAGoEjwwhk53c7ntnxYSg-vM2aO_waxFFTb2ZvfEYaAoK-EALw_wcB_k_&utm_content=go_12569673500_117393093097_507343765167_pla-295916403786_c__1478431012_137469912&utm_custom2=12569673500&gclid=Cj0KCQjwj5mpBhDJARIsAOVjBdo-E2WotmxE-DRAGoEjwwhk53c7ntnxYSg-vM2aO_waxFFTb2ZvfEYaAoK-EALw_wcB

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  10. I would like a Lego Mar-a-lago. Building it and then melting it. $1,800,000,000 up in flame. I take that back. XXXpresident Donny would be receiving money for sales of the model.

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  11. I had a lot of legos. But back then they were very squar-ish models of things. Nothing round or fancy, yet I played with them a lot. Son got more Lego bricks and I think we still have a bushel of them in storage.
    I had no idea there was specifically adult themed lego. But it makes sense because some of the kits are pretty spectacular for a child.
    There was a Seth Meyers segment where he got very roasted over “Legos” or “Lego bricks” meaning plural. I can’t find it online.

    “According to the company, the plural of LEGO is LEGO. They say LEGO is an adjective, the actual product being a “LEGO brick.” And adjectives don’t have a singular and plural form, so it’s always LEGO, never LEGOs. The plural is LEGO bricks or LEGO sets.”
    The more you know…

    My grandma only had toys from the church rummage sales. Tinker toys with only about 6 pieces. A couple Lincoln Logs. My brother had an erector set; must have gotten that from a garage sale too as it never had all the parts. I played with it a bit. We both, my brother and I, did plastic model kits. Me more than him. And my cousin David and I created our own models out of left over parts. I’m sure that helped my creativity and imagination. David and I created a lot of stuff and I always felt bad we sort of grew apart as adults.

    We also had a used magnetic set. Blue plastic board with 4 square magnetic metal chunks embedded then little metal pieces to create things. My brother recently found one at a garage sale and he bought it.

    And plain wood blocks. Did a lot of them as a kid and with our son and daughter. Fun stuff! Great toys!

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    1. Well, they can write pages and pages and pages about the rules of what’s plural and what’s not but the world Legos with an S on it is out in the world and it’s not going back in the box.

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  12. My sister and I had a wooden box with some painted wooden blocks. My most vivid memory of them is getting bonked in the head when we had a visiting toddler at the house, and she threw one at me.

    A neighbor we played with had an older brother who had Legos. These were 60’s Legos, so they could be formed into colorful blocky things, but usually nothing very imaginative.

    I disagree with the company. Lego is an adjective that is converted to a countable noun, when the word brick is removed. The plural gets an s.

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  13. According to various sources, Lego was originally a Danish wooden toy manufacturer, and the name derives from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play well”. A single block is Legoklod and multiple blocks are Legoklodser.

    In Dutch, Legoblok and Legoblokken.

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