My children have two distinct personalities. This has become very apparent with the addition of Legos to our household. First…what’s the deal with all the “kits”? How come you can’t find just a regular box of Legos that you can use your imagination and build whatever you like? (I just turned into my mother.) I know they sell them online, but I want to go to a STORE and buy a plain old box of Legos. And do they have to be so impossibly small? I feel like a giant trying to put some of these things together!

The Legos come with instructions on how to build whatever is pictured on the box. In our case, it’s the “city” series with the police station and police vehicles. Adam carefully decides which thing he is going to build and finds the instructions and correctly marked package (there were four things you could build in this one box). He starts building…Zach is flopping, flitting, bouncing, singing, stomping, kicking, twirling, jumping, banging, etc. Zach picks up some pieces puts them together, takes them apart, finds others and puts them together (“Look mom, an “L”…”I made a box”…”this can be a turbo jet.”) Adam routinely tells Zach to “stop messing around.” Finally, after about an hour, Adam burst into tears and says “Zach! I can’t think with all this noise! Stop messing around! I just can’t think right! You’re losing all my pieces! It’s going to take me longer now!”

So I suggest that Zach can use some OTHER lego pieces to make something and Adam says, “but you have to follow the directions! You have to make what’s on the box!” I tried to explain that you can make whatever you want, but Adam did not like that idea.