The great Lego project

I'm living in Lego Land. A sudden burst of organizing energy has us building, rebuilding, and cataloging all the Lego sets we have. It wouldn't be so many except that in addition to Calvin's, we have sets from Jon's childhood, my childhood, and others, like Curtis's and Gretchen's, so that our oldest set is from over forty years ago, and our newest from just one. And what began as a search for a single piece that was missing from a single set, or at least a replacement for it, became a exercise that closely resembled an archeological dig.

Calvin's sets, the newest of the bunch, were identifiable and accompanied by instructions and piece inventories, but the blocks from earlier childhoods had long been combined and tossed about, all memory of their original form having been lost to the ages. Tapping nostalgia and the internet we were able to identify certain parts and locate images, brick lists, and instructions.

It's been a whole family project, including grandparents. It's been a trip down memory lane. We printed, we sorted, we assembled. We disassembled and reassembled. Several times, just for fun. In the end we'd compiled a list of sets we have, inventoried the pieces and made a list of those that were missing, and put all the instructions in a binder for easy access. We labeled zip lock bags for the keeping of sets when not in use, although right now there isn't even one in storage, they're all decorating surfaces throughout the house.

There was a time, probably even just months ago, when an immersion of this kind would have left me uneasy. We'd been traipsing through ancient Egypt, with other ancient civilizations on the horizon, and I would have seen the Lego project as just a small break in a days activity, never been willing to spend whole days on it. But Calvin was keen on diving into it with every ounce of energy, eager to catalog, inventory, research, build, play, un-build, rebuild. I couldn't possibly curb that kind of energy, and in what was probably my first true unschooling act, I easily found the lessons in the one activity Calvin desired to do, in the identifying, the categorizing, the labeling, the building, and especially in the playing. Especially in the playing.

And as with all life lessons this one let us know when its course had been run. So we've come to the end of the project, but Calvin, and the rest of us by extension, is still living in Lego Land. We'll reap the benefits of our researching and organizing for many years to come.

Three childhoods worth of Legos.