Lego Family

There are those little moments in a parent’s life that can make or break your child’s day. I’ve written about these little moments before and since that day I have tried my hardest to appreciate them more and take advantage of them more. I had one of those yesterday and it ties in for a Lego of the Week, so it’s a win-win really (Lego of the Week, more like Lego of the month).

I was in the kitchen reading something that I needed to read for the school, when Connor snuck up on me. “Papa, do you want to help me build our family in Lego’s,” he asked. I am ashamed to say my first instinct was to say no, I needed to finish this but the look he gave me was a pleading please face and I couldn’t resist.

“You want to build our family? Like our house and yard?” I replied.

“No, just you, Mama, Alex and me in Lego guys. It’s really easy, all the Lego people are in the same place, remember.”

After he explained that, it was a lock, so we headed downstairs. Now let me explain that our basement could double as a Lego store if we wanted it to. Hell, it could double as a toy store if we wanted. A couple of months ago, there is no way I would have ventured down there and there was no way we could have found the Lego people. The boys and Mandy really deep cleaned it about a month ago and they have done a great job keeping it organized since (ok Mandy deep cleaned but either way the boys have kept it clean since. Give credit where credit is due.).

He found the Lego person bin and started to carefully go through each piece and put them down, when I decided way to slow and not nearly fun enough. So the entire bin was dumped out on the floor. We had a riot. Picking through to see what he thought each member of the family should look like. Who should have hair, who should have a hat, should Mama have long hair or short hair like she does now; all of this went into his thought process. We had them done when he was hit with a lightning bolt of an idea; we didn’t have accessories! So back in we went to find us all accessories.  After about thirty minutes, we were done and cleaned up and ready to present.

Here is Mandy and I. That is the shortest “girl hair” (his words not mine) that we could find. Mandy’s first accessory was going to be a cell phone but then he found a second coffee mug and thought that would be better. You can’t see because I couldn’t get the picture to show it well but Mandy is actually a queen from his castle set, because “Mama is really the Queen here.” I am wearing a green sweater vest and if you look really close you can see a lightning bolt scar on my forehead. Yes I am Harry Potter but Connor decides that hat would hide the scar and besides, “you have to have glasses Papa.”

Here are the boys.

Alex was the easiest to do for Connor. The hard part was finding the mitt he knew was in there. The only issue, “too bad we don’t have a Lego Angels or Utes hat. Alex would like that better.” Connor saved himself for last. I was happy with the way he portrayed himself. The hair he choose came from a surfer dude and it fits perfect. His accessory was the hardest of all the people we built. He wanted a sword, then a lance, then a gun, then he looked for a slingshot (I am still shocked with all the Legos down there we didn’t have a slingshot), then a frog, and then he decided he like the binoculars, because he really like looking at birds in the backyard. Works for me.

I am not tooting my own horn here but I am so glad I said yes to Connor yesterday. Too many times I have said no, that I am too busy or too tired. Too many times I have been this guy:

instead of being the dad he built for me.

Again I am ashamed to admit this but I was being selfish with my time instead of looking at what it would mean to him or Alex for that matter. We can’t be perfect as parents but we don’t have to be. We have to be there for our kids no matter what, even if it means stopping what you are doing for half an hour for some quality Lego time.