CRASH! That, my friends, is the sound of the Lego bin being upended. May cause heart palpitations and increased blood pressure (for Julie).
After about a year of hawking Wedgits (so easy to pick up! and they do love them), I recently got the Legos out of their purgatory in the shed. Henry insisted they’d clean them up, and mainly he’s been right. But I’m really having trouble with the giant pile of weensy Legos that exists during the day until cleanup time. The boys want to clean them up, but it’s not that easy. Does anyone know of a Lego Picker Upper to make the job easier? I was briefly intrigued by Box4Blox until I noticed that the video clearly shows a parent picking up the Legos, using the same laborious scoop-and-dump that we use. Box4Blox just organizes the Legos, but doesn’t clean them up. I haven’t passed into the territory of wanting my Legos organized, I just want them off the floor. Or maybe what I need is some kind of giant folding Lego tray, so the Legos can be spread out to play with, and then quickly whisked away off the floor at the end of the day. Once I tried using a dustpan, which worked ok except the dustpanning action, while it did pick up more Legos at once, also shoved a great number under the couch. So after we had to pull the couch out to get to all the Legos that had landed in the nether region by the radiators, it was a wash as far as time saved. Plus I was kind of ooged-out by the fact that I was cleaning up toys with our dusty dustpan. If it had really worked, I supposed I would have gotten a Lego Dustpan.
Against my better judgment, I did order some of the older, classic building-block-type Legos to give to the boys for Christmas. I think those are mainly what they want to use, and our giant bin of inherited Legos is mainly castle and spaceship parts, most of which are approximately the size of a lentil. So maybe they won’t feel the need to dump the whole bin? Eh, who am I kidding. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can Take Back the Rug I’d love to hear them.
Long ago, when I worked in retail, we shipped things to customers in boxes with packing peanuts. To scoop up the packing peanuts, we fashioned an ersatz scoop from a gallon-size plastic milk container…simply cut a large hole with a mat knife opposite the handle. It seems to me that that would work. Use the handle and sort of scoop up the tiny Legos and dump them into a receptacle. Let me know if it works!
They have a lego mat/bag- which we saw for sale in the gift shop when we went to legoland a couple weeks ago (actually a very nice, albeit expensive, themepark- they actually had healthier foods for sale at the concession stands- fruit, pasta, etc. A boy of about 7-8 yrs old would be in heaven in Legoland- Nora was a little young for it but still enjoyed it and we had free tickets so it didn’t matter that she couldn’t go on too many rides– but I digress…) Anyway- I saw this in the store there–
http://shop.lego.com/ByCategory/Product.aspx?p=852339&cn=13&d=443
Maybe it could be recreated somehow for less than $20? Erik says he thinks it would be too small to satisfactorily allow for sprawling lego building adventures.
Liz, I’m totally going to try that as soon as our current milk gallon is used up. I bet it could even work to leave the cap off and make it like a funnel (meaning it might be more fun to clean up). I like that Lego mat too, though, especially since I worry the milk gallon might just shove the Legos around like the dustpan did (though I’m certainly willing to try it, since we’re always overrun with milk jugs). Maybe I should just put down a blanket for Lego play, and then at the end of the day we can use it like a tarp and pick up the corners and dump the contents into the Lego bin.
I used to have a wonderful Lego cleaner-upper. It was called the vacuum!