An Early Inheritance

I love Legos. I got my first set sometime when I was four or five, and I have been adding to my collection by one means or another ever since, whether receiving them as gifts, buying them conventionally, through BrickLink, eBay, and yard sales, from purchasing a single piece to complete a project to buying smeone else's entire collection.

Needless to say, I have a bunch.

That's about 65 pounds of Legos. The under-bed storage container barely fits them.

But I have another problem — two small children, whom I also want to learn the joys of Lego. Do I turn them loose in my collection? I can't see that being a good idea right now. Do I just buy them their own? It's a good idea, but Legos are, quite frankly, expensive. (Whoever bought me that first set when I was young, I think, made a pretty serious investment.) Finally the answer came to me in the form of a 200-piece beginner's set that had been given to me on a recent birthday — maybe I could just separate out part of my collection, and share that.

It took a few nights of sitting there sorting through pieces as Deborah quilted and we listened to an audio book, but I finally had sorted out about 500 pieces that I thought would be appropriate for a Fiona. As I sorted, I noticed that a lot of the pieces I was choosing were ones from that very first set I had. I also made sure to include some of those pieces that I'd wished I had back when I was that age.

Her first words were, "Hey, there's a LOT of pieces!

The acid test then, was to see if Fiona thought I had chosen well. Judging from her reaction, I think I did. The effort to separate out all the slanting roof pieces was immediately redeemed when she said, "Let's build a house!"

The house that Fiona and Andy built. A surprisingly modern structure with a double-hip roof, skylights, slanting walls...

...and a big-screen TV on the roof. Who am I to argue? The blue pieces around the house are ponds, according to Fiona. I was about to suggest to Fiona that ponds aren't normally get that close to the house, but then I remembered that we'd only just gotten rid of the ponds that were closer than that to our own, real house.