One Lego Set

With all the kids in school, it's mostly just Peter and Katharine at home with me (sometimes Wes stays home with us). In preparation for back to school for us at home, I got Peter some coloring books and pens. Now we are a month into the school year, and the coloring pages have been drawn on or ripped, and his colored pens misplaced. What else for a toddler to do? We've gone into the basement to play toys, and that's working out pretty good. He makes little lego ships and minifigures and I try to minimize and organize. But Peter recently came up to me and told me mournfully "I don't have any lego sets..." While I know it's not true, it might as well be, cause poor Peter just can't keep track of his legos. He'll play with a set and take it everywhere with him, and bit by bit pieces get knocked off in the car or upstairs or in the kitchen or downstairs, and then it's scattered and lost, never to be reunited. Something funny Hyrum said recently, as one of the many truths that he learned on his mission was: Lego sets don't naturally fall apart, scatter, and get lost. Who knew!?!? He made a lego set that I sent him for his birthday, and he was kinda amazed that it stayed there all put together on his shelf for a whole year! It is true. It's not the lego sets themselves that fall apart, it is the children who destroy.

Well, the last week of summer, Natalie decided it was time to organize the legos by color. That project kept her and her brothers busy for that last week, but now they are in school and the sorting stopped, until now. I have taken over the task and we are going to get this done once and for all, and it's going to get organized and STAY ORGANIZED (and not because we are gone!). I worked for hours yesterday looking for lego pieces for Peter's Green Lloyd Ninjago robot. Like I literally looked through 9 of the 11 huge bins of legos for the final green bent piece for the robot arm, but to no avail. I gave up and Peter was content to use a red piece for the arm. I was a little surprised at my focus and determination to find that piece. And THEN, tonight, Wesley was taking apart a lego for Peter, and it popped off and rolled under the couch, and Peter reached under to find it, and wouldn't you you know,  he found the green arm piece! Wesley put the arm on and the set was restored and complete. Peter, you have a lego set!!!

One down, many more to go. Today Wes helped me organized today while he listened to Frankenstein for his English class. That was a pretty good use of time! We worked for two hours but even with both of us working pretty effectively, we didn't finish a bin. I wonder how long a bin will take? We don't have a lot of lego instructions that have survived over the years, but Lily says we can find them online. If the kids remember the sets they've received in the past, and if they want to make them, it will be possible once the legos are organized by color. That will be much easier than what I did yesterday whiel I was looking for the green arm, which was to try and find one lego in 10 bins of lego chaos. We can do this! So we will keep sorting legos over the next while, I bet we could maybe do one bin a week if we work on it every day, so 10 weeks? I've also decided that it will be a family project that we can do next weekend as we listen to General Conference! That will keep everyone awake! We'll have to have conference nice and loud though, to be able to hear it over the lego searching white noise (like this but x1000). It will be good to get organized and put our legos back to good use.