Last Friday, I sat down to do a 7 Quick Takes post, except, as you all know, it’s nearly impossible for me to write anything short and “Quick”. Once my fingers hit the keyboard, my brain goes into overdrive and the words come zooming out.

So the next few posts will be a condensed version of what would have been a 7 LONG Takes post. Most of these posts will be random and maybe unconnected but that’s the fun of blogging right?

Let’s start with – Legos.

They’ll be the end of me for sure.

In theory, I think Legos are great. They help kids learn fine motor skills and show them how to pay attention to small details while inspiring creativity and imaginative play. In theory. I think it would work really well if we only had one child, or even two older children who could play alongside each other nicely without leaving random Lego pieces all over the place.

This is what Lego playing is supposed to be like.

Which is as a believable as this happening:

This is what it actually looks like.

My 8 and 5 year-olds were finally starting to get into playing with the Legos. It gets tricky when you throw a human tornado into the mix who takes great pleasure in going into the Lego room and seeing if he can cover the whole floor with as many teeny tiny Legos pieces as he can. My poor older sons don’t even want to play with them anymore because they got so tired of their annoying little brother coming in and destroying everything they made.

I thought I had found a solution when we put all the Legos into a separate room with a baby-proof door knob.

Nope.

He discovered it and cried his cute little head off whenever his brothers would go in there and shut the door in his face, hoarding all the Lego fun to themselves. So I started letting him in to play every now and then while someone could be in there with him to keep most of the Legos out of his reach.

But we all now how the saying goes, If you give a Todder one Lego piece, he’s only going to demand for the another part to go with it.

And now he wants to go in there all.the.time. He grabs my finger and drags me toward the basement room saying, Degos, mama? Pay Degos?

He could probably spend the whole day in the Lego room, which is really pretty impressive since he’s only 2 and a half but already seems to have an engineer mind ready to build.

The problem is that the Lego room is also my husband’s “office” and my “sewing” room. Though I’m not sure why I still call it that since I haven’t touched the machine for who knows how long. It’s not really the safest place to leave a toddler unattended. Not so much for the sake of the toddler’s safety but for our own important and expensive-to-fix equipment we keep in there, not to mention all cords and electrical things in there.

Plus the little tornado toddler likes to get up onto the Lego table and play (which is pretty darn cute actually). Eventually, he either falls or screams at me to help him get down.

Sigh.

In the end, one of two things happen.

1. I reach my breaking point and go into rage and frantically scoop all the Legos away into a box and dump it in the trash put it out of reach.

2. I end up giving in and just letting him have his way in the Lego room just so I don’t have to deal with him crying and so I can have “extra time” to get a lot of unimportant things done.

WEAK? Yes.

I want to foster his creativity but maybe I’m just too much of a clutter-phobe?

This week, my goal is to think up some sort of a solution. A way to give him free access to some Legos without letting the Legos have free range over our house and a way to let the older kids make their own creations without worrying about him destroying all their work.

Any suggestions? Please tell me there is a solution?