Bloganuary 4: What was your favorite toy as a child?

These Bloganuary topics are not very well thought through.

If you consider that ‘being a child’ lasts from zero to 12 years old, there are very few toys that will remain with you over that length of time. Certainly for me there are few.

But if I think of something that I could consistently enjoy, consistently go back to, then it would be Lego. Lego also was always there. You could interact with Lego in so many ways.

I didn’t have the swish kits like you get today where your kit let’s you make one thing. I had a generic bunch of bricks that could make a house, or a boat, or a bunch of blocky people, or a tall building.

Whatever it took my fancy to make, that was part of the narrative that I was playing that day. Had I just seen The Wizard of Oz? Then I might make a house and destroy it in a simulated hurricane. Was there a World War II movie on? Then I might make boats and submarines and have a sea battle across the carpet-as-ocean. Maybe one of my block people had been bad; I could build them a windowless prison. Maybe some of my block people fell in love and got married; I could build them a house.

(I don’t want to seem like a destructive child with the hurricanes and war stories, but the joy of Lego was building something, breaking it up, and then rebuilding it into something else. If you had a storyline that incorporated that destruction/ rebuilding element, so much the better.)

I know the favourite toy that I never had was a kite. I really wanted a kite. I even asked for a kite for birthday and Christmas but no kite was forthcoming. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I bought myself the kite I wanted as a child. But I moved around so much in my 20s, that kite disappeared somewhere along the way. I don’t know where it went but I don’t have it anymore. And that makes me sadder than if I’d never had it in the first place.