Friday, March 29, 2024
39.0°F

THE STAY-AT-HOME DAD: Lego masters of mayhem

by TYLER WILSON/Coeur Voice contributor
| August 11, 2021 11:02 AM

I have a Lego blindspot.

For whatever reason, I didn’t play with the iconic building blocks much in my youth. I was more of an action figure/baseball card/Nintendo kid, and even when I did play with them, my building skills lacked finesse and creativity.

As an adult, my mechanical skills continue to be utterly pathetic. I don’t like reading directions, and I find visual instruction booklets (like for assembling an Ikea dresser or something) to be vague and confusing.

This includes Lego sets. The pictures in the instructions seem to be deliberately frustrating. Is it a dark blue block or a black block?! Does that translucent-red block attach to the second peg of the solid red block or the third peg?!

Anyway, these instructions are obviously just fine, as Lego is enormously popular and most children seem capable of following the instructions. In general, I struggle with my kids growing up and becoming more independent of me, but I do like how three out of four of them can now handle a Lego project without my consultation. You should see the Lego Batmobile my oldest son asked me to help him with a couple years ago. It’s not up to the typical standards of Wayne Enterprises.

Lego has taken over my house recently. Hundreds of blocks cover our dinner table. Completed projects sit next to unfinished ones, and while we have plenty of buckets and baskets to hold the loose pieces, the kids have made individual piles of certain blocks that MUST NOT BE TOUCHED by others.

I ask them to organize the chaos so we can eat dinner at the table, and I’m always met with pushback.

“I need those pieces RIGHT HERE!”

So we just push the piles together just enough to fit a few plates. When I wipe off the table, I can’t distinguish between some tiny Lego blocks and dried grains of rice. Same goes for when I sweep the floor… I wonder how many Lego minifigure heads I’ve tossed in the trash because they looked like macaroni.

The loose minifigure heads really irritate me. Those little guys are way more expensive compared to other Lego pieces, and so it makes me crazy when I find a headless Iron Man or an R2-D2 without his signature dome. Why do they even make his dome detachable? Nobody should treat R2-D2 that way.

My two girls love playing with headless minifigures. I’m not sure why, other than they like to switch the faces and hair, but more often than not I see little headless minifigures sitting on Lego couches, sipping Lego martinis. Should I be worried?

My 6-year-old daughter also enjoys making creepy totems of Lego minifigure heads. She makes these little signs or stakes them onto the edge of a fence around her carefully designed Lego house, as if to say, “WARNING: MURDER HOUSE A-HEAD.”

It’s nightmarish stuff… like something you’d see in a Freddy Kruger movie. I ask her about it and she giggles. “I like their cute little faces,” she says. Okay, fine, but what’s wrong with cute little, full-bodied minifigures? To me, they seemed happier before they were decapitated.

• • •

Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.