Or maybe, on second thought, the title of this post should read, "Resetting the Set." Either way, I've gotten myself into a minor organizational obsession revolving around our Legos. It's okay, you shake your head and mutter, "she has serious issues with organizing." I know. It's true.
But let's talk about my fabulous plan, because you're going to love it. Only let's go back in time first. In the beginning I had Lego sets in boxes. My husband had Lego sets in boxes. My husband didn't know me and I didn't know him. Fast forward and we now know each other and our Lego boxes are in the same house, taking up a lot of space because we both had a lot of sets.
We had a master plan that involved dumping everything together, tossing the boxes, keeping the instruction sets and organizing the Legos into very specific cubbies within containers. It looked impressive when we were done but was useless for actually doing anything. I think I wrote about the whole Lego Organizational Debacle at some point, but if not, that's the general gist.
We gave up and dumped everything into two large bins. It turned out that also didn't work because there was zero organization and we couldn't find anything. Or—and this is occurring to me just now—my husband and I have no Lego model-making creativity so we were doomed no matter what organizational strategy we employed.
But with either strategy, our Legos took up lots less space. Recently, I spent time dividing everything up again into color. My next plan was to get all the recent Legos we'd bought that had pieces lost or combined with other sets, and get them back into the box (or ziplock bag) with all the pieces needed to complete the model. I was surprised how many sets we'd acquired over the past two years when I brought them all into the craft room to start work on the sorting.
Initially, I did a collection of small "junior" sets my son had been given. There weren't many pieces, and the ones that were missing I happily found by going through my now-completed color-sorted Lego stash. I marked them as completed and put them away in a large bin. Then my son implored me to move onto one of our biggest sets. It was of trains, no surprise there. This large set was two large sets in one that we'd combined into a single box for storage. The trains are electrically powered and each set came with a good amount of tracks.
My son remembered these sets and very much wanted to play with them. We brought the box down from the attic and dumped it out on the floor. Let me tell you, this set was destroyed. I don't mean the pieces were broken (you have to try hard to do that with Lego blocks), but there wasn't much left that was recognizable as trains. But my son remembered.
He sat beside me, playing with the parts that were left, sitting on some of the pieces as he did so. He was very happy. I sat beside him and broke things apart, sorting them by color. We ran out of time to finish the job today. When I get done, I'll use the last two pages in the instruction books to identify which pieces go with which set and which, if any, pieces are missing. I'll look from our main supply for replacements. When I'm done, I'll have two large sets ready to be put together again at some point in the future. (Tomorrow if my son has his way.)
If you're wondering why not leave the set as is in their partially deconstructed form because some of the model is already put together, I can tell you from experience It's a mess doing it that way because of how things are layered or done in a particular order in the instructions. It almost takes longer to put a model together from a partially completed state than it does to break it down, start over and do the model from the beginning.
This Lego organization thing may sound crazy, but sitting there, sorting little pieces into colors, listening to an audio book is calming and makes me look forward to putting the sets together with our children again when they're older and can follow the instructions with some help from us.
The Big Boy Update: Our neighbor's son was having his second birthday party today. I told my children at eight-thirty this morning that we would be going to Whittaker's party in a little while. Shortly after that I heard the door chime. I asked my husband if he knew where our son was. We looked and I said, I think he may have gone next door to Whittaker's house. As I was typing a text message to the father, I got a picture of our son in their house, grinning with their two children. They sent him home and we talked about being polite and waiting for the party to start before arriving.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: We went to a party tonight after it had gotten dark. My daughter suddenly said from the back seat, "wait, why is the moon following us?"
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