Protip. Put expensive stuff you want for yourself on the registry. It's unlikely that anyone will buy it (but hey if they do great!) but after the due date they send you a coupon for 20% off if you buy everything left on your registry.
We got a bunch of lego sets for the older kid that way, and the discount counted!
When my daughter was about 3 years old,I went on Ebay and bought a huge bag of used Lego. I think it was 10KG or so. My wife nearly got a heart attack, especially when I poured all those little pieces into the bath and filled it up with water,so I could wash them a bit. Then ended up catching the smallest pieces when I pulled the plug. We poured all those pieces in the living room. Took like 3 days to dry out. We built so many things since then. There are lots of sets mixed together,I don't care nor does my daughter. It's still nice to build something, especially when all you do at work is sending emails and writing some code here and there.
You can still buy buckets of Legos. If you're unsure what to get your kids (or somebody else's) give them a bucket of Legos, or something from the City line.
My daughter will be getting her own Lego and possibly a selection of mine. I organized mine for the first time in my life last year. Some of the sets I've had since the very late 80s and early 90s. Those aren't getting lost :P
She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.
When I was eleven, three local K-mart stores had a simple drawing to win 1000 dollars worth of Legos. They had these little boxes with stacks of entry forms next to them and a pencil to fill them out while you were in the store.
Each store was going to give away a thousand dollars worth of legos.
Even though there was a store just a few minutes from us, we drove to the one 20 minutes away in a dilapidated shopping center because inspection of the drawing box indicated that fewer people were submitting entries at that store. We would drive to the stores in the morning, take all the entry forms available except for a few and I would spend my summer mornings filling them out. I believe we dropped close to a thousand entries in the various boxes. I put the majority in the low traffic K-Mart but entered a hundred or so in the other two stores as well.
I got a big manilla envelope in the mail with Lego letterhead congratulating me and 3 different catalogs, lego, duplo and technique.
I spent two glorious weeks poring over the catalogs with my brother carefully tallying up to the 1000 dollar total.
A month after submitting the order we received two giant boxes. Few things have ever made me as happy.
If I value my childhood Lego by how much playtime I got out of it, then it's the cheapest of my toys growing up.
Then my sister used it after me, and then my cousin, and now that old box of Lego is now part of my cousin's kids collection. Some of those pieces are 40 years old and still in use. What a deal!
Ha! I went to the Lego store once pre child and got excited about the advent calendars. The man next to me asked how old my child was, I had to admit that I didn't have one.
An idea: I have a three-month-old daughter who I'll definitely be buying Lego for when she gets old enough. What I'll be looking for is whatever's the least valuable in your collection -- big bins of cheap mixed stuff to see what she invents. Maybe that would be a cool side output for your project? Cheap chaff packs for kids of hackers ...
My problem is my son looks at the sets and says, "Dad! Dad! There's a brick I don't have in that set! You need to buy me the set!"
But yeah, he builds a set by the instructions once, lets it stay together maybe a month, and then it's just parts going into the bins of bricks, to be endlessly remade into whatever catches his fancy.
With three kids, my wife and I used to buy Lego at every opportunity. It was also an easy gift idea to give to grandparents.
My kids haven't played with Lego for years. They enjoy doing it Minecraft or one of a zillion other Steam games that offers the same build-it-yourself functionality as Lego.
What happened to my LEGO? This is a question I ask myself from time to time... and kick myself (a little) because I know part of that answer. I'm the youngest of 3 and all the various LEGO trickled down to me. My brother and I were big into the space themed sets. We had a bunch of those base boards in grey with moon craters and what not. When I left for college I had amassed a large suitcase full of bricks. One of my best friends in HS had a significantly younger brother that was the coolest little kid I knew. I gave him my suitcase. He was so happy. I think I quadrupled his collection. It felt good then and it still feels good now when I think of how happy little Elwood was. But now as an adult with kids of my own, I kick myself a little bit for not seeing the future. What I would give to go back and tell 18yr old me to hang on to those sets. Even back then I probably had at least $1k worth. Today that suitcase would probably be worth several thousand. But most of all, I would love to be sitting on the floor with my boys, building (non Star Wars themed) space ships with the same bricks I used 30 years ago.
As a parent of 3 kids who have more lego than they know what to do with, I disagree. They've got a ton of lego city stuff, a few technics, and a couple of the character/themed ones. That's enough to cover the living room floor about an inch deep, with a few spare pieces to hide near their beds for me to step on at night.
There are special parts, not that many of them really. A lot of them can be worked around with a little builder's ingenuity. The special parts that are the most annoying are the ones where we have one or two, they're small, and they're somewhere. Not where we're looking, or where we've been looking for the last half hour.
My kids build the kit design once. Then the pieces go into the bins. They'll build it again, in motley color schemes, with adaptations. They'll build boats, cars, towers, trucks, and spaceships. And some things that I can't name, but they can tell you exactly what each piece is for.
And in the last year or so, they've started downloading the instructions for sets that they don't have from the lego site, going through them and figuring out what pieces they don't have and need to work around, and deciding if they can build those items. (This is a 5 and an 8 yr old). At 5, the kid is looking through a set of instructions, identifying pieces, remembering if there is one of them in the thousands of pieces we have, and deciding if it's something that can be worked around. That's pretty good training for engineering.
Lego is great. A while back they had something where you could design your own hero factory on their website, so my son started saving up and doing chores so that he could get one.
Well, after a couple of weeks, we went to build one, but we couldn't find anywhere where we could do it. The website said we could, but we couldn't find where to. My wife emailed Lego and asked them how to do it, but it turns out they were no longer doing it, but the website had not been updated (in fact, they had stopped doing it before we had even seen it to begin with).
My son was very sad of course, but Lego sent him a $20 gift card and a bunch of stickers and some stuff so that he could buy some other hero factory stuff, which made his day and allowed him to get much more than he could of with what he saved up.
My oldest, 3.5ish, is just starting to get into the little LEGO sets. To say I’m not beyond excited to uh… buy more kits for “him” would be a huge lie.
We got a bunch of lego sets for the older kid that way, and the discount counted!
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