Pigs Do Fly

Kiddo turns five today.  After debating a number of gifts (He loves the few video games that are playable and suitable for his age that are made for the xbox360, so we were really thinking about a wii), we decided on legos.  He likes building toys, and enjoyed his old toddler sized ones (oversized, easier to stick together) for a long time, and recently was telling me that he doesn’t want to play with “baby legos”, and wants some with “little dots”.  At preschool they have a drawer of regular legos set aside for the older kids who don’t take naps or for when they are ill; they are a special treat.

So, I went in search of legos.  Something has happened to those old primary colored blocks in the many years since my brothers and I dug through them happily building away.  Finding plain vanilla legos proved to be an adventure.  Want to build a deathstar?  a pirate ship?   Spongebobs underwater home?  Then legos are apparently for you.  Boxes of complex designs, blocks of specialized shapes and colors — what happened to my legos!  After a trip to my local “one stop shopping store” (a few feet of aisle devoted to legos), then to Target (an entire aisle), then to Toys R Us (2 aisles), and then finally to an entire Lego Store I recalled seeing in the mall (I’m not much of a mall shopper), I eventually found a box of simple legos instead of sets that won’t require mommy and daddy to sit down sweating over design plans.  Well, OK, there were two.  One box with just plain old blocks, and one “starter set” in a tub that must be at least half non-blocks with windows and doors, etc.

For me, a box of legos (or tub of lincoln logs or tinker toys) is supposed to be an empty canvas, an invitation to imagination.  There is just something sad about all those lego sets, confined to pattern, closed to creativity.