Dawson Times

Red, white and blue stand for freedom in these United States.  Legos may be mostly red, white and blue (with a touch of yellow, black and grey), but… it’s a cover.  I live in a war-zone called Lego-ville.

New parents don’t know the painful prison that they will be trapped in once they buy their child their first set of Duplo blocks.  It will never end. You will be buying those little blocks from hell, and hating every moment of it, until the day your child becomes interested in the opposite sex.

From the primary-colored Duplos to the Falcon Millenium, your feet will be scarred with the pointy corners of those deceptively lethal toys.  You will clear them from your vacuum cleaner hose a bazillion times in the coming years.  You will find them in your car, carpets and cupboards.  You will even find them in your toilet, your dryer and in your child’s nose.  They will be everywhere.

You can collect them all and put them in the “Blocks Box”, but as soon as a child plays with them, they never find their way back to the box unless you personally put them there.  The little buggers don’t like the boxes you designate for them.  They want to invade your house and breach your wall of sanity.

There will come a time when you say “enough is enough” and you will stop buying them.  You will rebel against the system that says your child must have Legos when he is growing up.  But since grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends are not aware of your “rebellion” and wouldn’t understand it unless they have had to deal with a houseful of Legos; chances are that your child will receive at least two or three sets of these torturous toys for every birthday and Christmas until they start getting acne.

Your rebellion eventually will go so far as to sweep them up with the rest of the dirt on the floor and toss them in the trash can when nobody is looking.  There are no statistics on this, but I’ll bet that the landfills are loaded with these surreptitiously tossed Lego pieces.  I wonder if they are recyclable? 

If they were, you couldn’t use a recycle bin, because the kids would know, then, that you are tossing their toys in the Lego Recycle Bin.  Your kid knows nearly every Lego piece he owns.  So you can’t toss the non-generic ones like Sponge Bob or Luke Skywalker.  They would know if you trashed a perfectly good goblet or sword from his Knights set.   So you have to be careful to do it inconspicuously so that they will not know you are rebelling.  If anyone ever found out, not only would the kids watch their Legos more carefully, but the adults who buy into the whole “Lego culture” thing would lock you up.  “Legos help kids build creative things.  They must be allowed to use their imagination.

Ba-loney!  Legos were made for kids to get addicted to so parents can spend their entire lives picking them out of places they were never meant to be.

So, when you have a dust pan full of dirt and Legos, you must first pick out the Spell Book from the Harry Potter set, the treasure chest from the Aqua-Raiders set, and the catapult from the Crabby Patty set, before throwing the rest in the trash.  Then, you cover them up with the scrapings from last night’s dinner, because if your kids do happen to see them in the trash bin, they won’t want them back if last night’s dinner has touched them.

When your vacuum cleaner picks up another 2X2 block or you step on a squared off horse on the way to the bathroom at night, you will renew your vow to somehow remove the enemy from your house and have a block-free home before the kids leave for college.

Then we must not be led into temptation again when our grandchildren come to visit, lest we spend another twenty years fishing Lego blocks out of our bathtub drain.

Are you with me?  Let’s do it!

Laura Snyder

You can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her new book.