Putting Away the Family Legos

At the beginning of the summer, my youngest daughter and I pulled a bag of our family Legos out of my office.  I wanted to open up some space and clean out the clutter, so this seemed like an easy start.  

Years ago, when my girls were young, we introduced them to Legos through the Duplo line.  Those
were fun; they loved the idea of building and breaking apart and building again.  Good times.  A few years later, I bought my oldest daughter her first set of Legos with the Lego Friends line.  This was a fun theme of Legos as it was girl focused in marketing and product.  Over the years we purchased several, well okay, lots of these sets from small ones like the dog training set, to the large sets like the Lego Friends house.  I loved to help them build the sets and play when they were built.  I have no doubt that these Lego friends toys were the most played with toys in the house.  I liked to build my space sets from the 1980's and have space invasions of the Lego Friends town.  They didn't always like that.  Hehehe...

Flash forward to this summer when both of my girls graduated.  One graduated from high school heading to college and the other graduated from 8th grade heading to high school.  They are growing up.  Something I haven't been very supportive of, but there is no stopping it, I suppose.  Anyhow, the youngest and I were cleaning up a tote bag of partially build or broken sets with random pieces spread across the bottom of the bag.  The goal was to figure out what pieces went to which set and deconstruct what was left of the partially build sets.  Lets just say, there was a lot of organizing to do.  As we got started, my daughter decided the best way to get the lose pieces organized with the sets was to just rebuild the sets.  She told me what she needed from the lose pieces and we hunted for them together.  We spent several hours rebuilding about 5 sets that were in the bag.  We hunted, built, talked, shared memories with the sets (I didn't mention the alien invasions), and had a good old time.  It was a nice way to start the summer.  

I couldn't bring myself to tear down the sets we had just built, so we took them to the basement to display and look at for a while.  Our mission was accomplished as we found a home for all of the lose Legos from the bottom of the tote bag.  

Now, school has started.  One daughter off to college and the other navigating the landscape of high school.  It was time to change out the display of Lego Friends in the basement.  I took them down one-by-one and started taking them apart and organizing them in their own Ziploc bags with the directions.  In this process, I was struck.  I will probably never build Legos with them ever again.  I let it sink in.  I will never build Legos with them ever again.  

Of course, the hope is some day when the grandkids come to visit, we will pull those "old" Legos out of the basement.  I don't know what that will be like, but I don't imagine it will be the same as building them with my daughters.  Maybe it will be more wonderful.  I don't know.  Nevertheless, the family Legos are now put away.   

I guess it is just me now as building Legos isn't really my wife's thing, so I pulled out my Star Wars Legos that I have gathered over the years.  I started rebuilding those.  Even though I am building those on my own, I have the memories of all the hours of fun I had with my daughters as children building the Family Legos.