A Pirate Scene

The 5 year old has lately taken an interest in pirate figures when playing with Lego. That seemed to be the primary driving force in the scenario she created that is documented below.

First, a mermaid holding an umbrella had to make an appearance, along with an alligator.

I'm not really sure the reason for the soldier, although I suspect she doesn't differentiate between him and the pirates since he came with some of them. You may notice in the above picture at the far right and in the following the peg-legged pirate is at the end of the line of the main pirate group. That is because he has a peg leg, so he runs slower. Let's now take a look at what they are running towards.

Err, apparently they are headed to fight a group of Storm Troopers and Mandalorians. Wait, I don't think those guys are normally on the same side...

 

I also think that one of the Troopers is holding a katana. Frankly, I am finding this all a bit confusing. As for the bystander...

I'm at a loss to explain any further.

The Big Parade

The long weekend started with building a new Lego house, trying out some new building techniques for the windows and incorporating a nice little side garden by one of our young gardeners. She also added decorative lights over the window.

After building this house, some more came down from the shelf and lined the street. Pretty quickly, in anticipation of Independence Day, a full on parade started to form, being led by a dutiful police officer.

After the horses, the necessary crew showed up as well.

Conveniently a helicopter was available to get an arial shot of the festivities and the gathered crowds.

There might not have been 76 trombones, but it still was a pretty big parade for these little people.

Ready to Move Out

The empire is really getting busy and pulling old troopers out of retirement for their upcoming battle. After some retraining they all seem to be ready for duty. Well, almost...

CMF Series 4

Reports starting hitting late last week that Lego Collectible Minifigures Series 4 were hitting the west coast in Fred Meyer's. One of which happens to be pretty close to our house, so when the kids woke up Saturday morning they found this sitting on the kitchen table.

Normally new sets get tucked away in the closet until a rainy afternoon, but in this case I wanted to confirm we actually had all 16 so I knew whether to watch for any misses or not. The reason I was confirming this is the packages are unlabeled, so I spent time in the store feeling packages late Friday night to try and confirm the contents. I'm guessing I wasn't the first person to do that during the day, as the store clerks trying to restock the shelves only looked at me like I was a bit crazy, not completely off my rocker.

Luckily after 15 minutes of opening bags and assembling, we had the target of all 16, plus a few doubles that the kids were looking forward to playing with. This is one of the easiest ways to stock up on girl figures, which they particularly seem to enjoy playing with.

The kimono girl was probably their favorite, due to her pretty flower dress. It is a pretty cool print, and the fan is a first as far as I know. The kids have good taste.

And the whole crew arranged with giant cups and boxes looming in the background. All around Series 4 is a pretty good arrangement of figures that even if you were to pick randomly would be unlikely to let you down.

Fun on the Farm

We really like farms around our house, in addition to liking Lego. That made some of the farm sets from last year really hard to ignore when they were being clearanced this past winter.

The particular set we ended up with was the pig farm and tractor, along with some extra pig farmer and pig sets. Set up, and with some extra visitors on the day we built we had a modest little farm scene.

After a few days on the counter the farm became slightly more elaborate.

You'll see the ostrich was finally contained within the fenced area, and a horse moved in as well. The knight might seem a bit excessive, but with a troll just outside your farm, you need to have protection, and the little dog in the corner just can't outmatch a troll with a club. Best of all is the picnic table in case anyone get's hungry. It's not often you see one of those in a pig sty!

An Airplane

The little one spent a while one day working very diligently on a plane of her own design. I helped out by placing one or two 1x8 plates on it to provide some stability, but the bulk of the work was hers. After careful construction, an appropriate pilot was selected.

The best part of this project was that upon completion she declared it to be Daddy's plane and was for me to play with.

Furnished Rooms

One of the presents under our tree this past Christmas was the Lego pink brick box. Included in this box was a book with building ideas that included plenty of furniture. This has inspired several creations, all of which get tucked back into the pink box every time they are played with. Along with a wide range of other parts from basic bricks to swords which I was not aware were considered "girl" Lego.

It is interesting that in our house while there is such a thing as Girl Lego, there are not any that get referred to as Boy Lego. One could assume that means everything that is not Girl is Boy, but I don't think that is the case. Everything else just seems to be Lego.

Lightbox Round 1

For taking pictures of small objects, a lightbox seemed like it could be useful, and it seemed like a pretty simple project to take a stab at. The kids actually seemed pretty excited about it as well, even though they had no idea what it was before hand. Apparently the name sounds pretty exciting. The first step was to find a box. Thanks to ordering Lego sets on Amazon, that was pretty easy to find.

The one item we needed to buy was a piece of poster board for the interior. That was placed inside it as a continuous curve. After that we placed a plain white sheet around it and put a light overhead. In retrospect a thinner piece of fabric and a brighter light would have worked better, but this worked as a reasonable proof of concept.

The obvious next step was to take some test shots. The first subject chosen by the kids was this hula girl.

This shot of an AT-AT was my favorite of the shoot.

This setup also looked kind of cool when I pulled back a bit. Don't look if you don't want the magic destroyed. But it's not that magical, so I'd go ahead and look.

We used a small enough box that not everything we tried to take shots of really fit, but they were still fun to experiment with.

Maybe next time we'll get a bigger box.

Building Towards Anachronisms

What you see below is a typical early stage of a build at our house. Those are the contents of set 7571, The Fight for the Dagger freshly freed from their packaging. You might note that the minifigure parts have been divided into two sets at opposite sides of the table to ensure each young builder gets an equal share. Patiently waiting in the middle is a pile of parts for the next stage.

The build itself is a mix of chasing parts from mini MOCs that show up during the main build and moderating turns at adding pieces to the actual build, without losing too many of them to the floor. Typically at the end of, the result is something fun to play with together.

This stage of the play is distinct from the first as it starts to exercise the imagination in a different way. It is usually at this point that other parts and minifigures start making appearances to create very interesting anachronisms. It is tough to say if the white classic space guy doing a Matrix impression, Woody from Toy Story, or the jet ski with a flower growing on it is my favorite addition to this particular Prince of Persia market scene.

We also see an example that princesses are far from helpless in our house. Not only is this princess able to fly, which is obvious since she has a cape, she also wears claws for rescuing others. The box art had her waiting to be rescued by one of the other characters.

And lest anyone thinks little girls are always sweet and innocent, we see a person here who has been turned into "a scary monster guy" with a skeleton face by one daughter. In the meantime her sister decided it was quite appropriate to decapitate the poor axe guard. But what can you expect from a guy carrying two swords on his back while wielding a third?

Valentine's Day Special

Around our house, Valentine's Day (and other) cards have a tendency to be homemade. Depending on who is doing the giving, this can be due to either really enjoying making cards or not remembering to make one until late the night before and not wanting to go to the store. I won't say which category I tend to fall into...

This year though I did something a little different to go with a handwritten note for the girls. They both seemed to like them, although I think I could have improved the design a bit if I had found some proper slopes to work with.

Flying Saucers

We dug an old Spyrius 6835 Saucer Scout out of the box of sets we have been working through.  On opening the box we realized we didn't have the instructions, but I think we did a pretty good job at this.

Pretty quickly we started digging around in the parts bin and this showed up.

Then things started to get a bit scary when more visitors started arriving.

It seems that we have an invasion on our hands!

Mermaid

The 5 year old came up with this mermaid design all by herself.

I am a Robot

We first built the Spyrius Recon Robot (set 6889) as a lazy afternoon build.  Both girls seemed to think it was pretty cool judging by the contention over who got to play with it first.

At one point while tired of waiting for her next turn to play with it, the younger one was inspired to build her own robot.  The imagination of youth is an amazing thing.  I can't wait to see what her creations look like as she gets older.

Interplanetary Arctic Explorer

In a large box of sets purchased last summer we had a few Ice Planet 2000 sets.  Among them were some small impulse sets that had some neat white wheels for driving around on a snowy planet.  It seemed like a good idea to combine as many as we could find onto a single vehicle.  From here my helpers dug through the parts looking for interesting white pieces.

We then applied some various shades of translucent blue to give it some color.  This particular model made use of many studs and white 1x2 grates.  Coincidentally we had just stocked up on those at the Lego store before building this particular creation.

So far the explorer has been unsuccessful at finding alien life, but we are still hopeful it will find success.

A Tall Colorful ... Something

As much fun as it is to tear into a massive set and build a Troll Castle on a weekend afternoon,

it is really important to remember that just a few bricks and a desire to see how precarious of a structure can be built is also an exciting endeavor.

Such a project is especially exciting when being aided by a 2.5 year old who is eager to help and doesn't quite appreciate the fragility of very tall skinny towers.  At least she is willing to help rebuild them after the occasional collapse.

The Limo

One of the most fun sets we have built is 3222, the awesome Helicopter and Limousine set our 5 year old got for her birthday.  It was a fun build, and has been very fun to play with.

But then the Rebel Scum showed up and starting making trouble in the neighborhood.

They even corrupted a noble Snow Trooper into the gang. Oh my!

A Ride on a Trailer

This entire model was built by my 5 year old daughter without any help.  The day this was built she really wanted to build a trailer to pull people around on, making use of a pulley she found in the parts bin.

It seems we were short on traditional posts to hook the tow rope to though, so she improvised with the obvious replacement of some poor guys neck.  Surprisingly this almost worked, although since he wasn't centered on the trailer, it did tend to pull to one side pretty sharply, especially if one drove it too fast.

The car itself was a bit spartan, but it seemed to have the horsepower to get the job done.

I particularly enjoyed the posing of all of the passengers.  I would imagine any trailer of that height being pulled by a rope around a guys neck is going to be a pretty wild ride.  I'm sure the steering wheel is also very important, although I have no idea what it was intended to do.

A Windmill and a Stable

The most popular builds around our house for a long time were buildings.  These would typically be either a house or a stable.  To keep it interesting I liked to experiment with different ways of building the roofs, partially inspired by the fact we were running out of slopes without dismantling the other buildings.  In this particular case I made use of the cheese slopes we filled all the holes in our first Pick-A-Brick cup with.  Not a particularly original technique I am sure, but it was my first time really making use of the piece, so I was happy with the result.

In addition to the roof, this house also has one the windmills I built.  At one point we had 5 or 6 of these around our buildings, although they seemed to fall apart quite frequently.  The base turns so it can face the wind no matter what direction it is coming from.  And of course the horses have some hay inside for their dinner.

The other thing I enjoyed about this door is the use of two headlight pieces to attach a handle, making it very easy to open the door.  You don't want your horses to be stuck inside when it's time to go out for a ride.