Oliver is obsessed with Legos. I'm sure this is true of most 5 year old boys, but for him, his imagination has found its voice among his bin of brightly colored bricks. The Legos Oliver has acquired over the last few years have mostly entered our house in neatly packaged little sets. We have had many hours of fun following the little diagrams and constructing the vehicles and robots pictured on the box. I always expect Oliver to play with the thing we just painstakingly built, but the longest I've seen one last is about 24 hours. He adds to them, disassembles them, puts things back in different places and repurposes the parts for other creations.
This is very telling of who Oliver is and how different he is from me. I consider myself to be a creative person, but if I built an awesome fire truck, complete with little firefighters and accessories, I would keep it just as it was for a long time. I am a rule following, make it perfect, color-inside-the lines kind of girl. He is a figure out a way to get around the rules, make it different, coloring books are too constrictive kind of kid. It used to kind of irritate me that I would spend an hour putting a Lego set together for Oliver and 5 minutes later he would take it all apart. However, now that Oliver is older and more able to make his own creations, I can see that his imagination cannot be confined within the strictures of perfect design. He is not himself if he can't make something his own or turn it into something new.
In the same way, what manifests itself as defiance or non-conformity in his behavior, I am now beginning to see simply as a need to do things his own way. While we still butt heads a lot, I am learning how to meet him where he's at, rather than expecting him to visit me in Let's Be Perfect Land. Its funny how watching the little things your kids do can provide the greatest information about who they really are and how to relate to them. They say the that art imitates life, I guess in this case Lego imitates life.
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| Legoland at the Mall of America (we went there for the first time today) |
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| The helper bot creation. This photo does not do it justice - it has three arms and a tail with a drill on the end. |
You live in Minneapolis, have a Lego obsessed child, and you've never been to the Lego store at the MOA? I've been there twice in the last 6 months :)
ReplyDeleteSounds like Oliver and Dan would get along well. Me...I'm more the rule follower type myself! I can completely relate.
Keep the posts coming!
We haven't even been to MOA in about 3 years! Oliver was a little young for the Lego store before, but now was the time. We needed baseplates and those are hard to find. I myself thought it was pretty cool!
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