This could get a little out of hand

As I've mentioned before, Oliver LOVES Lego.
Actually, 'loves' is probably not a strong enough word. He is completely obsessed with it.

He's always been the kind of kid to latch on to something he likes and throw himself headlong into it: as a 3 year old he was all about the Spiderman, and when he was 5 he loved Indiana Jones. He had to have the clothes, the DVDs, the books, the stickers, the bed sheets (more so with Spiderman), and he would take great pleasure in dressing up as his favourite character. We actually own 5 different Spider man outfits, plus the branded clothes (don't worry dear readers, much of it was handed down to us!)

So now it's Lego. He's liked playing with Lego for a while now. We have always encouraged it because it's a pretty durable toy (my parents still have my Lego from 25+ years ago), you can use bits from 30 years ago with bits from today, and I think it encourages imagination and problem solving.

Oliver and Sam used to play with Lego a bit, though Sam would always make the 'really cool ships' (like this one that we still have displayed in Sam's room)
and Oliver would always be trying to take bits off them. Needless to say there was some conflict.

Since Sam died though, Oliver has gotten into it even more. He plays for hours and hours some days, pulling bits of other bits, changing the little people's arms and hair and faces, building fantastic stuff.

The other day he was building a 'house'. I used to do that when I was a kid (mainly because you could only get house bricks, windows and doors), but I wasn't very clever at it, building stand-alone walls that would fall down when you pushed them.
When I saw Oliver making the house, I thought of that, and told him that he needed to join the walls together. When I went to show him, he'd already done it, interlocking the wall bricks together, just like a bricklayer would. Needless to say I was very impressed, and started having visions of my son's wonderful career as an engineer. :)

But the thing that really worries me is that Anthony's now getting in on the act. The last couple of times we have been to Trash and Treasure, he has bought a bunch of Lego (including a couple of retro space sets). I don't really mind, as it's much cheaper to buy it there, but he's talking about buying lots more. I think he may be falling under the Lego spell. I know of adults that are hooked on Lego (one woman on EB posted recently about buying a 'Death Star' for her husband's 40th), who build the models and display them in their lounge rooms with special lights. I'm not sure I'm ready for that!!

Nah, I'm not that worried. It's nice that they're doing something together other than playing video games, and it's nice to see Oliver happy and playing. Anthony's even been doing some sorting and tidying:
(although there have been a couple of 'don't touch that one Oliver' moments). I must admit, even I'm getting in on the act a bit. I've bought a couple of little bits off Ebay.

But then Anthony started talking about painting our house 'Lego colours'. Hmmmmmm.....