FLASHBACK PROJECT (NOT QUITE SO RECENT)
Way back in 2015, the grandparents (my parents) got our oldest son one of those big bags of Mega Blocks for Christmas. When I say “big”, I’m not talking, “Oh, there are 25 blocks in this bag.” No, this was the 150 blocks First Builders bag. As a one-year-old at the time, he didn’t quite get what all the blocks were for. As he toddled towards the age of two, though, he and his Daddy (hooray for that being me!) built garages to house other toys, castles to peek through to poke Daddy’s nose, and towers that have dared to reach for the sky.
But then, once he reached two, it happened–he discovered LEGOs. Of course, he didn’t start by seeing LEGOs meant for his age range in the store. Nooo, instead, he discovered some boxes of LEGOs that I’d never put together: The Kingdoms Prison Tower Rescue and the Special Edition Knight’s Kingdom King’s Castle. Then he got excited. Then I got excited, because he was excited. LEGOS! My kid’s getting into LEGOs and . . . THIS . . . IS . . . AWESOME! And thus began our project, which was building these two magnificent sets of medieval goodness, which funnily enough leads into the topic for today–perfect!
TOPIC FOR TODAY
The Tower Rescue set is the smaller of the two sets at 365 pieces, and given that my son was only two years old, seemed like the best set to start with. It was amazing to watch him when he first saw all the pieces that were in the box: Not just squares and rectangles and semicircles of different colors, but doors and a princess and a catapult and fire! This was one of those incredible moments when you get to see the world open up before your child and share in the joy and wonder that they experience at seeing something new that they never even expected existed.
OK, so I am an engineer, and as such like to have a logical approach to things. What does the engineer do? Goes right for the first instruction book, to see where to start. What does the two-year-old do? Dives right in! That’s when I discovered it’s possible to simultaneously laugh and be shocked and internally lurch towards telling your kid, “That’s not how you do it!” The great thing is that this was one of those rare instances where, when I tried to get my son to settle down and check out why I was looking at the instructions, he listened. We checked things out, took a look at the LEGO people, and got started building the first part of the set: The tower with a catapult platform (below).
Catapult Tower for Knights Prison Rescue
Without going through the play-by-play, here’s the grand summary: My son surprised me because he did really well. He figured out how to put things in place, and even the right places, based on the pictures and my pointing and guiding. He was super happy to make the catapult tower, and really focused on the building of it. I feel I underestimated what he, as a two-year-old, could do without assistance. But he blew me away, and so there’s the first lesson learned by me: If you give your kids a chance, they’ll show you just how amazing they really are.
Once we had finished building the catapult tower, we took a break because neither he nor I was ready to build the whole set all at once. That’s when I gave him my lesson and words of wisdom:
Look at this tower. Do you see how amazing you did at this? This is just one part of the whole set. When you look at a house, or any building, after this, don’t worry about how to build the whole thing all at once. All you have to do is focus on building the part you’re working on right now, and you can worry about the other parts once you get to them.
See, I don’t want my kid to look at the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House or even really cool treehouses and feel like he could never make something so incredible or cool-looking. I want him to be in awe of beautiful creations and buildings, yes, but I want him to know that he can make such things, too, one part at a time. I want him to dream without boundaries, and make those dreams into incredible realities.
We did end up finishing the Kingdoms Prison Tower Rescue, and it’s just as awesome as it looks on the box (below, left). He loved playing with the gate, moving the knights around, rescuing the princess, and raising and lowering the portcullis (by hand–he’s snapped two pieces of string that were meant to raise it and lower it using a turnstile). After a couple days, we started working on the other set, which is an incredible 869 pieces (see below right). Starting that set gave me a final lesson learned: Even when your kid does amazing with one set of LEGOs all the way from start to finish, at two years old, his patience and ability to focus runs out at some point. My son’s now happily trotting the second set’s knights around on horseback, merging the king and wizard figurines to make an all-powerful, shiny-crowned wizard king, while I’m assembling most of it. According to the instructions, of course.
Completed LEGO Prison Tower Rescue
Knight’s Kingdom King’s Castle, In Progress