After dinner last night the little man and I settled in, in his room, to play with the new Legos he’d been given. We didn’t get around to using all 1500 of them, but we gave it a good shot. I started having weird childhood flashbacks, to playing Legos with my brother and the neighborhood kids, and how stressed out I would get when, in the midst of creating, I realized I needed some odd little piece that there were only one or two of, and if I gave voice to this need, out loud, then surely someone else was going to nab my piece, so I would have to surreptitiously search for it with sidelong glances and then oh so carefully, quietly reach for it when the others weren’t looking. Uh, yeah. Last night wasn’t quite like all that. No, it was more about the little man looking through the Lego how-to booklets, requesting I build a certain creature, and then attempting to snatch it from me before I’d finished. That sort of thing I can deal with…and am quite used to. Foolish me, however, didn’t foresee a power struggle come cleanup time. For no good reason that I could ascertain the little man decided to dump all the Legos out of one bucket, just as we were finishing up. Then he had the nerve to tell me to pick them up. Nuh-uh. I had already put away the Legos I had been playing with, thank you very much. So I coaxed and pleaded and prodded and finally lost my patience with the uncooperative little punk and hit him below the belt. Figuratively. I took away his new Batman figurine and announced that it wouldn’t be given back until every last Lego was returned to its bucket. Oh, the emotional maelstrom that was unleashed. My son repeated “I am sad sad sad” and demonstrated this feeling with some faux crying. Which eventually turned into genuine crying when he realized I was serious and wouldn’t budge. I had to leave the room, as the sound of him replacing just one lego piece per minute was too much like Chinese water torture. My departure seemed to spur him into action, though it still took him an age. At least he’d chosen to dump the 500 piece bucket instead of the 1000 piece tub.
