So much Lego

The kids destroyed their Lego village today so they can try playing something new because, as Miriam said, "We've been playing Harry Potter for four years!" Instead they've made up a medieval role-playing game, where they role dice to assign roles (king, nobility, peasant) and the catastrophes their characters have to deal with. They have it all written down, along with which die which roles get to roll. For example, if you roll yourself an illness then how sick you get depends on which die you get to roll. The king gets to roll a seven-sided die. If he gets a 1, he gets very sick and has to roll again. If he rolls a 1 again, he dies. If he rolls a 5, 6, or 7, he gets immunity. A peasant, on the other hand, gets to roll a four-sided die. So you can see his odds of getting, and staying, ill are much higher than the king's since he wouldn't have good access to doctors or medicine. 

When it comes to acquiring wealth, however, the king gets to roll the smallest die and the peasant the largest die because in that scenario the king should have a higher probability of stuffing his coffers than a peasant would. 

They've thought long and hard about medieval inequalities. 

Anyway, before they destroyed their creations I took several pictures for those interested in seeing what they've built (hi, Mom!) and Andrew took several more pictures a couple of weeks ago so I'll add those in at the end. This is the children's wizarding world...

We'll start the tour off at this house with a lovely bay window:

I do not recall whose house this is, but it has a lovely interior.

Next door, in the blue house, there is a bed with a fancy quilt and an amazing headboard:

This is Malfoy Manor...or something like that. It might be Draco Malfoy's house (so a little less grand than the manor where he grew up), but it still has a pool with these lovely loungers on the deck:

And a string of party lights out in front:

And this overstated treehouse in the backyard:

The treehouse is really pretty amazing. Miriam made the trunk and the tree and then added one level of house after the other as her siblings requested more and more rooms for more and more children:

Here's a view of Benjamin's bell tower, which caused so much drama in our house on Sunday. His big sisters decided they were the bosses of the wizarding world and poor Benjamin could hardly do anything (which is why I'm excited to see how this new game will pan out, even though I have a feeling it will end up very much the same way) without his sisters' express permission. "I'm going to build a _________!" he'd say excitedly. "We don't need a ________," his sisters would respond.

At one point he came upstairs crying that "Rachel won't let me unlock my imagination!"

Anyway, he'd tried to build a working bell tower but had used the "only piece" that the girls needed to complete the working car they were building (using the motor Benjamin got for his birthday, mind you) so they made him give the piece to him and then he couldn't figure out how to create a working bell and there was a whole lot of yelling. But finally they came up with this and put it in the center of the village and everyone was, more or less, happy.

Here's a cute little stroller Miriam made for the baby:

This is Miriam's fast-food restaurant:

It's got a little milkshake blender and till at the counter, a soda fountain, ketchup and mustard, and stacks of cups...

This is the "basement" of...something. Hogwarts? I'm not sure. It has a luggage storage room, a row of toilets, and some bunkbeds?

This fancy bubble bath is so great. I don't remember which character that's supposed to be, but she kind of reminds me of Rita Skeeter. Who knows? (I'm sure I will get all sorts of corrections from the girls when they read this).

Here is a grocery store next to a doctor's office:

This bakery is particularly adorable...

You can see a view of the front of the bakery behind the library (a cop car is parked out front because the officer is inside reading up on how one appropriately confronts their internalized racism):

Here's the front entrance of the library:

Those gates open and close (automatically in make-believe but manually in real life):

This little hair salon is so great:

These little hair dryer machines had me giggling. I asked Miriam how she even knew about such things and she had a good answer (some movie we watched once, I think).

There's even a wig display that would make Moira Rose's heart skip a beat (though I'm honestly not sure why Miriam thought to include a wig collection (she certainly hasn't watched that show)):

I love this little rooftop herbology centre:

This is the Forbidden Forest, I think:

And here's someone or other doing some astronomy:

Because Benjamin wasn't quite invited to participate in the Wizarding World, he (with some help from Miriam) created a Star Wars world. This is some base thing:

That big wall can be lowered to act as a landing pad:

Here are some barracks, with super colourful walls and rugs:

Here's this other base thing:

And this is the set he just got for his birthday (it can actually fling little round disks, which he thinks is pretty awesome):

Here's Benjamin showing off some of his vehicular creations...

His space ships...

And firetruck #44:

And here's Alexander; he likes to build towers and spaceships:

So, those were all the pictures that I took this morning. Rather they aren't all the pictures I took; just some of the best ones (which isn't saying much). Here, then, are the pictures that Andrew took a few weeks ago. Rather, here are some of the pictures Andrew took a few weeks ago (and here is the link to more).

A previous view of the Malfoy's house (prior to the addition of a roof (and pool and treehouse)):

The town square, with a statue and fountain and fancy gazebo—with a chandelier (without the bell tower, which would later be added on top of the gazebo):

This lovely minimalistic kitchen:

The baby's room is probably my favourite room in the whole village.

I just love that stained glass window-wall:

Here's their ferris wheel (they have an entire little fairgrounds set up with a monorail and a twirly swing thing and swan-boat rides and this):

Here is a modular apartment building they made:

They are stacked together now, but the floor easily separate so you can play with people inside each unit. The front of each unit opens up as well. Here's the bottom floor:

And the middle floor:

And I didn't grab a picture of the top floor, but you can head over to flickr to see it there.

Miriam made a little orchestra, which I thought was rather cute. She had a keyboard, a harp, woodwinds, brass (with a tuba even), handbells, and a cello.

The cello was so great!

So that's what the kids have been up to for about the past month! We have four big bins of Lego and I think they used up three of them! Now everything has been disassembled and they're starting on their medieval world so we'll see what they come up with...