Legos seem like such a cool toy when you see them at the store.  You think to yourself, "That would be kinda cool to build together with my child.  It would be a GREAT bonding experience!"  You buy the Lego toy all happy with yourself, take it home, and hand it over to your progeny with a smile on your face.  You setup a time to get started and then the time comes.  You carefully open up the box and all the little plastic packages that come inside of the box.  You seperate out all of the pieces in some sort of logical order that makes sense to you.  You look through the instructions a couple of times and get yourself mentally ready to tackle it.  Meanwhile, your child is anxiously staring at you repeatedly asking if you are ready yet.  Finally, you turn the page to step one and find the pieces and set them out in front of your child.  You tell them what needs to happen and they start going to town.  After a period of time, depending on the number of pieces, a completed Lego toy now sits in the hands of your child.  They have a smile on their face beause they have a cool toy to play with, and you have a smile on your face because you spent some quality time with your child.

Now, the next step in this process is your child sits down on the floor and starts playing with the toy.  They drive it around a bit and make vroom, vroom sounds with it.  After half an hour or so, they decide, hmmm, I'm now a mechanic and I need to take it apart all the way down to it's component bricks.  You see them starting to take it apart and warn them that that might not be a good idea because it takes a long time to put it back together and you might not remember how.  Your child looks up to you and says "That's OK, dad, I remember how to put it back together."  You smile down and say, "OK, I just wanted to make sure."

Now the toy is completely taken apart and laying on the floor.   Your child comes up to you and says, "Ummm, daddy, can you put it back together, please?".  You tell them "But you said you could put it back together yourself!"  You quickly dig out the manual from the recycle bin and start the whole process over again.

Now fast forward to a few weeks later.  The toy has been taken apart and put back together at least a hundred different times.  You have LONG ago thrown away the manual (when you threw it away, you KNEW it was going to be a bad idea to throw it away) and parts seem to be disappearing here and there.  There's also a part here and there that have broke from being taken off and put back on and glued a couple of times.

And the furthur along in this process you go, the more and more you SWEAR to yourself that the NEXT time you have to put it together again you are going to put it all together with super glue, but then you are just WAY too lazy to do it.

Finally, after a few months, the Lego life cycle is over.  One too many pieces has been lost somwhere and the toy can no longer be put back together with the accumulated lost pieces.  All the little pieces get thrown in the miscellaneous Lego block box and you march yourself back to the store to either buy an exact replacement for the favorite Lego toy, or a brand new shiny Lego toy.

Now, I'm assuming, as the kids get older, the Lego toys are going to get more and more complicated.  So far, the most complex toy has been a Lego Airplane toy which was somewhere in the hundreds of different pieces.  I don't think I'm going to be able to put these things together more then a time or two straight from memory alone.  Maybe as he matures, he can either do it himself, or he will get over the fascination of taking them apart. 

So, to fix some of this, we're thinking of just buying a thing of blocks and he can build whatever toy his fertile mind can think of.  So far, we've only been buying the toys, because those look the coolest to him.  But I think buying a bunch of blocks and letting him build whatever he wants is something, long term, that he'll enjoy more.  And, mentally, will be the most healthy for me.  I only have so much hair left on my head, and the more I can keep the better.  Eventually, I might have to go the buzz cut route, but until then, the less stress I put on my hair the better.

Man, having kids just complicates your life.  :)  I'm not complaining though, I wouldn't change a thing.