LEGO Creator Creating

After only three years of life with LEGO, we've amassed an impressive collection. The boys now have sets from about six different themes, plus a bunch of miscellaneous bricks to work from. I'm rather impressed at some of the stuff I've seen them build. Oscar, who is only four, built both of these this past week:

 This one is a police station, complete with jail cell and storage rack. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good angle on it, but it looked pretty good in person.

This one is an airplane with twin engines.

Wyatt has started to not only stare at all the pictures in the latest LEGO catalog, but to attempt to build some of the things he sees there. As a result, I picked up a copy of The LEGO Ideas Book for his birthday this month. It's supposed to be over 200 pages of LEGO creations, split into themes throughout the book. Considering how much they love the catalogs, I imagine it will get a lot of look value, but I'm also hoping it will inspire more building. (I just may get down there and come up with a few myself.)

I think out of all the sets we've tried out, Creator is my favorite. We only have two of them at the moment, a Log Cabin and 3-in-1 helicopter/boat, but they are both getting another set each for Christmas. The best part about Creator sets is that they use mostly standard bricks, with only the occasional special brick. That means they are more adaptable, and gives us more play value overall.

Trying to find something new to do yesterday with Oscar, I thought about this and wondered if we could use the directions you can find on the LEGO site for one of the Creator sets and build it ourselves. So, we went to the site and looked through the instruction list. We built a mini-dump truck together (unfortunately, I forgot to get a pic of it, but here is the original if you are curious what it looks like). Oliver helped us come up with a solution to the fender piece we don't seem to have, and we had to use some other colors, but it came out looking pretty good.

When Wyatt got home, he wanted to get in on it, so he picked out a set to try. I tried to steer him to the mini-models, but he wanted something more impressive. I wasn't sure he'd get all that far with it because it was so involved, but Oliver sat down with him and managed to crank it out with a few modifications. It was a riot of colors, so I sat down with it this morning and substituted pieces until it looks mostly red and black. Here's our end result:

 The wheels fold up inside the plane, which is kind of awesome.

Here's the link to the original set to compare. It took a few hours to piece out and build, and I'm really surprised we had so many of the right type of pieces. Clearly, the five pounds of miscellaneous LEGO I bought off Ebay a few years ago has worked in our favor (we also raided some of their sets - I got some of the red stuff from their Lego City Fire Boat).

Yeah, Lego wins at our house, more than any toy by far.