It’s a well-lit room; just watch where you walk. There’s a Lego box right there!
It’s a well-lit room; just watch where you walk.  There’s a Lego box right there!
It’s a well-lit room; just watch where you walk.
There’s a Lego box right there!

By Mordechai Schmutter

Today I have great news for all you parents out there who have kids who are into Lego and who may have recently made some serious mistakes as far as presents.

Yes, I know I bring up Lego a lot. I have a son who’s obsessed.

It’s not just him. Lego is bigger than ever these days. There are even Lego alarm clocks. I always thought a Lego alarm clock was when Totty steps on a piece of Lego next to your bed in the morning trying to wake you up, and he wakes up the entire room and lands on you.

But every time we ask him what he wants, he says “Lego.” He never asks for anything else.

Sure, you can say, “Who cares if he has nothing else? If you have enough Lego, you can build everything else!”

Not the way he plays with it. This is how it works: He gets the set, and he spends the first hour fully building it, and then he spends the next several years slowly losing the pieces. The instructions are the first thing he loses.

When I was little, there were no instructions. Or all these strange, single-purpose pieces they have nowadays. So mostly we built houses. Nowadays there are instructions books, which look similar to those published by IKEA, which is basically adult Lego–you have these wordless pictures of smiling, hairless men putting together 3-D models based on 2-D pictures.

“Um, I can’t see how the back is supposed to look.”

I think that when you turn each page, you should be able to see what the step looks like from the other side.

But this is because there are specific Lego sets nowadays. Not only are there specific sets, but there are specific worlds, like ninjas have their own world, and knights have their own world, and you can’t mix the worlds. There’s even a Jewish world called “Binyan Blocks.”

You don’t have to buy the sets. You can go to official Lego stores and buy a bucket of exactly what you want, piecemeal. They have everything in its own container–red 2×2s, blue 2×3s, those skinny ones that you need to take apart with your teeth . . . They also sell a piece that pries apart the Lego so you don’t have to use your teeth. My kid has it buried in his piles somewhere. But he’s not afraid to use his teeth. He has Lego in his mouth all the time. Yet he will not eat chicken. My chicken cannot taste worse than Lego pieces that have been lodged in the bottom of my foot.

So, yes, you can buy Lego piecemeal at the store, but the store is designed to get you to buy more than you need. They have these big sculptures, like, “Wow, a 30-foot giraffe made out of Lego!” At one point a sculpture like this would have been impressive, but these days, how do I know that’s not just a large giraffe-shaped Lego piece? Just because it’s not in one of the sets I bought? My kid’s into ninjas!

If you don’t know, ninjas are these ancient Japanese warriors who are experts in self-defense methods that largely involve blending into the shadows. Except that Lego ninjas wear Day-Glo colors. They also come with these big, flashy vehicles, because sometimes you need to drive big, flashy vehicles into the shadows, with massive tires and hundreds of tiny knives sticking out of the treads, which as far as I can tell would make a racket sneaking up behind someone. I don’t know how knives on the wheels have a practical use in vehicle design. Are they driving through a wheat field?

And apparently there’s a whole team of ninjas, though there’s one seat on each vehicle, so they can’t carpool. There’s a red ninja and a blue ninja and a yellow ninja, and, to me, they don’t look like different characters. I would say it’s just the same guy wearing different outfits.

“I don’t know, on Tuesdays I wear green. I’m hiding in the cabbage patch.”

But my son tried to explain it to me. He’s like, “This is the blue ninja. He always wears blue. This one always wears green.” Because ninjas don’t have weddings where they’re all supposed to show up matching for pictures. But that way, if you see the white ninja in the shadows, you know which one he is. Ninjas like to be easily identifiable through their niqabs.

It’s also easier to share a laundry basket if you know what color everyone wears. I get it. I have several boys sharing a room, and they all wear the same color socks. There’s no tag in a sock that says what size it is, and it keeps changing size every time you wash it. Yet they’re all on the floor and I have to figure out which laundry basket to throw each one into or there will be fights later over who gets to wear which sock six days in a row.

The colored costumes are for hiding in different environments. Blue hides in the ocean (probably for short periods), green hides in the trees (but not during autumn), and red hides in . . . volcanoes? Where is the yellow ninja trying to hide? The sun? I don’t know why there’s a yellow ninja. Their skin is already yellow. I guess it’s good if you’re attacking people at the lemonade factory.

But that’s what my son is into. Ninjas.

I’m like, “What about that set? That looks cool.”

And he says, “No, that set is Chima.”

Chima is a whole different Lego world, based on China, I think. They call it “Chima” instead of “China” for legal reasons.

I personally like the Lego City collection, which is a more realistic world that has police stations and airports and construction vehicles that pretend to build skyscrapers, when really it’s you who did all the work, and a lot of emergency vehicles. What kind of emergencies happen in the Lego world if everything can be put back together? My guess is most emergencies involve the Lego men stepping on Lego.

“Ow! It’s lodged in my foot.”

This is because the way you play with Lego is you spread it out all over the floor, and then you walk off and do something else. Even if the kid cleans it up, there’s no way to do that properly, because thanks to scientific advances, the Lego company is able to create smaller and smaller pieces every day. They have a piece now that is one square by one square, has no protrusion on top, is half the thickness of a regular piece, and is the same color as most of my floors. My son’s typical set comes with 800 of these. And then there are the hundred vehicle swords that he started losing on day one. Those are brown. And I occasionally find them with my foot. I yell “Ow!” and he goes, “You found one!”

And it’s all nerve-racking, because if I accidentally vacuum a piece, he will never again be able to build the nonsensical vehicle that someone paid 50 bucks for. And then you have to take into account the pieces that are confiscated by his rebbe.

“Your son was eating these in class. Please take them.”

“No.”

I say that all Lego should at least glow in the dark, so you can spot them when you’re walking around at night. I also say coffee tables should light up. And discarded shoes. And chairs with wheels.

Which brings me to the most exciting new Lego product in forever: Lego Slippers!

Don’t worry; these aren’t slippers made of Lego. Those would be the worst. They’re actually colorful slippers with really thick bottoms so you can step on a Lego piece and not get hurt.

Yeah, I already have something like that. It’s called Crocs.

But at least Lego is acknowledging the problem. Finally, they heard our cries. They were pretty loud.

Some people are saying, “They create the illness and then sell you the cure?” Yes. This was the 66-year business plan.

The way the slippers work is you step on Lego piece and say, “Ow! I should have been wearing my Lego slippers!” Because you never expect to step on a Lego piece. It only happens by accident. If I know I’m going to be playing with Lego, I wear steel-toed work boots, because that’s what you’re supposed to wear when you’re building something.

And the good news is that they’re great for walking down the street on Tishah B’Av and Yom Kippur! Except that they’re mostly red.

The slippers should really be issued free to everyone who buys Lego, but right now, it’s only going to randomly-selected customers in France. Probably because they sell a lot of Lego Eiffel Towers over there.

But if people respond well, they might start selling them everywhere!

Wait till you find a Lego in your slipper.

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of five books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com.

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