Day 54: LEGOs

This is not a stock photo. I actually built this wannabe Thomas train using a guide in a classic kit.

I love playing with LEGOs. Sometimes I build with the instructions just to learn new techniques or see the level of details that are possible in a design. When we first started fostering, I got a set of LEGOs for the house - just a small one. One of the few genuinely happy memories of that experience was stopping into the LEGO store at the Christiana Mall and creating figurines with backstories and accessories. 

Since then, the LEGO collection in my house grew. During the pandemic, my daughter and I would design houses, robots, anything that struck our fancy. I love when we just sit next to each other and letting our creativity wander, and LEGOs allowed us to do that in 3D.

One of the ways I knew that my relationship with my husband was ending was because of a LEGO kit. My husband and I were having a date day; trying to reconnect and find things we might have in common. He surprised me with the space shuttle LEGO kit. While it is something that I would ordinarily have loved to receive, I was stressed about the expense from the moment that massive yellow bag was in my sight. 

I tried to let that go; focus on that fact that he had picked out something that was intellectually interesting to me and also a hobby I enjoyed which he'd previously not shown interest in. We were going to spend that at-home date (pandemic) building the shuttle together. Except, my job got to be turning the pages on the instructions. Or making the second one when the page said "2x". Observing the situation objectively, I was basically watching him do something the way he wanted to do it, not considering how I might perceive the situation except in choosing the aerospace model. The craziest part: I was letting him.

I want to take responsibility for this aspect of our marriage and how it put fault lines between us: if the options were disappointing him or disappointing myself, I chose to let him be happy every time. I would find a way to a silver lining and try my best to ignore that pit in my stomach that told me I was not having my needs met that way I hoped. 

With his prompting, I would blame myself for not having gone out of my way to involve him in the LEGO building I did with my daughter - and then use this to justify why I was not interrupting his building by trying to participate, too. I couldn't build a section on my own, but he could - and I was supposed to be grateful for him being considerate and doing something I liked. Later, when he was in the dining room building the shuttle without me, I realized I could not rationalize his need to control everything between us if everything even included how we built things with LEGOs.  If you're thinking we had more issues to deal with - like communication deficiencies - you are accurate. 

As this is a gratitude post, I want to focus on the life lessons I have learned from building with LEGOs:

1. Clean up after yourself; stepping on a LEGO you lost in the carpet hurts.
2. Instructions are more like guidelines than actual rules - unless you want the model to look like the picture on the box.
3. If you mess it up, you can always take it apart and try again.
4. Select your attachments carefully. If you put a thin piece on another one of the same size, they are almost impossible to separate without the use of fingernails or those glorious orange-thingies kits come with now.
5. Everything can have a different function in a new situation, so be open to possibility.
6. Sharing is caring. Building is almost always better with a friend.
7. No matter how hard you try to smooth it out, sometimes you just have a bunch of square pegs with round holes.

To see more LEGO builds and read other life lessons, keep coming back.

This is NOT from a kit; it is a home of my own invention with a dual-sided fireplace, full bathroom, ladder loft, and a powerboat off to the side.