Lego Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Christmas Break is almost over and I cannot believe how much fun we have had.  You remember my Christmas gift to myself?

Diagon Alley

A few days after Christmas, Jeremy and I started assembling the Diagon Alley set.  It was so much fun that it made us want to build the old Hogwarts set, and then Hagrid's Hut.  Then we reminisced about the old King's Castle we both had as kids.  So Jeremy built that.  Pretty soon we were looking up Lego plans on-line and realizing that our sets would be so much nicer to build if we had all of the parts together and the only way to do that would be to sort through all of the legos and build those sets.  So we did.

I understand so much more about children and sensory needs as I feel the sensation of plastic pieces on my fingertips and the melodious, deafening sound of the legos krrshing against each other.

Diagon Alley was so enormous that it came in bags labeled in three groups.

It also had three separate instruction booklets (which is what enabled Jeremy and me to each build our own part.)

Lego directions have become a lot more direct -- see, item 1, don't build legos in the grass, use a table and item 2, don't mix the bags they so carefully separated for you.

And also, don't throw lego pieces -- even those that look like balls -- at anyone's head.

Building Gringot's

Building Olivander's

We loved all of the detail work in the set -- look a lego chandelier.

Diagon Alley - complete!

Sydney's first ever "follow the directions and build it herself lego set" -- it was a miniature Hogwarts Express that came as a freebie with Diagon Alley

She was so proud of herself!

This is when I realized that the lego building was not something my husbad was doing to humor me -- all of those sets so carefully set out on the piano and I was not the one who did the detail work!

Diagon Alley -- alive and well in my living room!

Sorting through Legos to build Hogwarts -- this is when we realized it would take a lot of sorting to find all of those unique pieces. 

I found this one!

Hogwarts 4709 (released in 2001)

These small sets were some of the first Harry Potter lego sets -- there was one of Diagon Alley with Hermione, Ron with the Griffindor common room and bedchamber and Harry with Hogwarts classrooms.

The end goal for all of the sets is to have them in gallon bags with all of their pieces and their directions.

So this is what a bin of random legos looks like.

Sorted by color.

Doors and Windows -- there were also bags for wheels, steering wheels, people, weapons, horses, cups, frying pans, gem stones, boats, and greenery

The old King's Castle, circa 1984

John helping to pull brown pieces out of the gray and black bin.

Building Hagrid's Hut

Hagrid's Hut

King Leo's Castle (2000)

When rebuilding the Western set (1996), I found the original decals for the bank and general store that had never been applied, so I went ahead and did that step.

Legorado, as we like to call the cowboy set takes up an entire shelf in the playroom.

A more close up look at Legorado

Sydney did get to play with some of the sets either as I building or just after I finished.  Why there is a dragon attacking the Indian encampment, I do not know.  Yay for imagination, powered by legos.

The next set we did was the Adventure set (which was not the Indiana Jones set as Lego did not have rights to Indian Jones in 1998, so it was just a set with an adventuring dude in a brown hat looking for artifacts with a old man with glasses while villains with eye patches tried to stop them.  Once again, not Indiana Jones.

Sydney and Andrew played with the Adventures set.  I did make them find all of the pieces at the end, though.  They had temporarily lost the "mommies" that came in the set.  No worries, though, as the "mommies" were soon found inside the "coffins" that came with the set.  No matter how many times I tried to tell Sydney the word was "mummy" she simply either could not hear the difference or didn't care.   Either way, it was very confusing for Jeremy in the other room -- "Why is there a mommy in the Adventures set to begin with?"

WWI era aircraft -- very cool -- and further proof that this is not Indiana Jones -- everyone knows that the real Indiana Jones fights Nazis!

Up close look at the Adventure set

In the midst of other Lego building, there were some sets on minor markdowns at Target.  Most weren't worth it, especially right after Christmas, but this little blacksmith shop looked neat and it seemed like a fun idea to build this new blacksmith shop and then go back and look on-line for the directions for the old blacksmith shop.

6918 Blacksmith Attack - 2011

6040 Blacksmith Shop -  1984

It was interesting seeing the two sets side by side.  The old set was certainly more basic.  It didn't even have moving parts where the new on had a "water" wheel that when turned hits the hammer which taps the knife on the anvil.  On the other hand, the old set holds such charm and nostalgia for me.  How could I pick a favorite between them?

Fairly easily, actually.  Only the new one came with a Lego chicken.  Bock!  Bock! Bock!  Did someone say "Lego chicken"  Isn't it funny what they are coming out with now?  And yes, I kept it in the bag.  Of course I did.

All the King's Horse and all the King's Men... I just had to do that

The whopping two "modern" sets I own -- I built them mostly because I was tired of running across the dozen or so light pink pieces that came with the cabana.  I remember buying that set and honestly, I bought it because at the time, the pretty female face was so rare and you could not buy it with mini-fig packs and somehow that made the set worth it to me.  I hope in retrospect that it was on clearance.

I never outgrew Legos.  I don't know why.  I rediscovered them in college and honestly, that's when I bought the western and the adventure's sets.  I bought the newer castle sets as well as Harry Potter after I graduated.  I remember having Legos out in my college apartment and again in my dorm room my senior year.  Jeremy's "girlfriend test" in college was the gaming -- he needed a partner who understood his enjoyment in pretending a new world.  My "boyfriend test" was the legos -- I needed a partner who understood that this is as grown up as I'm going to get.

I have pictures of Jeremy playing with my legos in my college dorm room.  At the time, I guess I was satisfied that the sight of legos in a dorm room didn't send him packing.  I never really stopped to consider that he might enjoy the legos as much as I do.  I always thought he was humoring me.  Now I understand that the sense I had that his heart wasn't 100% in it was just the sign that we weren't playing his way.  I like to build my own thing -- probably because my favorite thing to build is Victorian mansions and no one has a Lego set for that (yet).  Jeremy likes to build sets.  He likes to follow the directions and make something purposeful and cool.

It has been an amazing blessing to have this time with my husband in the new year.  I have felt like we are dating again in a way that I have not felt since before the kids were born.

That it took playing with legos to achieve that feeling... well, that's just us.