Pajama and Lego Day

Newsletter 2024-12-27

Traditions were meant to be created on the fly. This year, my wife Lola came up with a great one. She likes to declare themed days when she and the kids are all on vacation or break. Past hits include spa day, complete with face masks and faux mimosas, and movie day, complete with ample amounts of popcorn and a large blanket pile in the middle of the living room floor for communal watching/cuddling. I don’t feel the same drive to make up themes when I’m home with the children, mainly because I’m always home. My favorite theme is to have everyone be quiet and leave each other alone. Consequently, that’s the one theme that’s impossible to follow. Sisters always exist in a state of low-key warfare, even when they’re getting along. Sometimes, it’s just friendly combat. More than once, I’ve told them to stop fighting only for them to tell me they’re actually playing. Seconds later, one of them will be crying. The line between fun and antagonism is non-existent in this house.

For Christmas Eve, Lola came up with a theme even I couldn’t resist. She declared December 24th to be Pajama and Lego Day. The rules were self-explanatory: Wear your comfiest clothes and put together plastic bricks while watching Christmas movies. I suppose that last part isn’t necessarily intuitive, but we had to have something on the screen to give everybody a secondary distraction other than fighting with each other. We had plenty of Lego sets to go around. We opened our presents last Saturday on the first full day of Christmas vacation for the kids. Everybody received at least one large box of plastic building materials, including me and Lola, who bought our own. She found some sets on sale weeks ago and asked me which one I wanted. I picked out a Lamborghini because I thought it looked cool. Little did I know I was sowing the seeds of my own destruction.

Lego Day got off to a slow start. The girls like to stay up late and sleep in later. When I’m working from home, that’s ideal. Some days, I won’t see them before noon. For Lego Day, the kids swore that wouldn’t happen. They all set their alarms for 8 a.m.. Lola and I didn’t believe they’d actually follow through. They tried, but without the fear of missing the bus to motivate them, their morning routines were more lethargic than ever. I didn’t see all four of their tired, not-quite-smiling faces until long after our goal time. That worked out better for me. I knocked out a few household chores and got the card tables into place. Lego Day requires a lot of surface area in the living room. Finally, around 9:30 a.m., we had everyone in position with their unassembled toys in front of them. It was time to begin.

Our first movie of the day was Red One. It was good, but it had a lot of profanity for a feature aimed at kids. I don’t have the exact figures, but I suspect it was the most swearing in a Christmas film since Die Hard. We watched it anyway. I’m sure the kids have seen worse on YouTube, despite my best (or medium-est) efforts to protect them. While we watched, we worked. My fourteen-year-old, Betsy, assembled a beautiful flower set; my twelve-year-old, Mae, put together a Lego Friends greenhouse; my ten-year-old, Lucy, took on a massive Lego Ninjago dragon; and my nine-year-old, Waffle, built a Hogwarts tower. The girls received the main castle as a birthday gift from my friend, Greg, but it can always use some extensions. There’s no such thing as too many magical fortresses in the playroom. Lola had a more unorthodox challenge. She picked a kit with three bugs. There was a butterfly, a praying mantis, and some kind of scary looking beetle. I shudder to think of what natural selection pressure required it to develop a massive sword on its head. Apparently there are tougher environments out there than growing up in a house with a bunch of girls. Or maybe not. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waffle also grows a sword on her forehead.

I focused on my aforementioned car. It looked simple enough on the box. It had four wheels and went vroom vroom. Actually, it didn’t make any sounds at all. I made them with my mouth because I have the same maturity level as my nine-year-old. I didn’t realize when I asked Lola to pick it up for me that it would be the only set of the bunch with miniature machines inside. It had gears and twisty bits to make the front wheels turn and the pistons on the rear-mounted engine go up and down. The mechanisms to pull that off might have been extremely simple by industrial standards, but they were highly complex by toy ones. I spent the first two hours building an intricate series of interlocking widgets that looked nothing like a car. It was far more mentally taxing than what I’d bargained for. Still, I pushed on, backtracking when necessary. Several times, I discovered something in my machine was slightly off, requiring me to undo the last two or three (or ten) steps. Quitting wasn’t an option. Everybody else in the room managed to follow their wordless instructions just fine. I refused to be outsmarted by a picture book.