I just had Xay bring Mike ‘n’ Mike up from the basement. I had put the plastic box full of giant legos (either called primos, or baby duplos, depending on which set you purchased), in the basement. Tired of tripping over blocks, no matter how large, every time I walked in the family room, I took the box of Mike ‘n’ Mike out of circulation, in favor of the baby bin, which is full of a larger variety of toys. We also have a large yellow box of mega blocks, which Esteban was playing with this morning, when I had Xay bring up Mike ‘n’ Mike. Esteban can’t put blocks together yet with the mega blocks, so I thought the simpler construction of Mike ‘n’ Mike would be easier for him. It might be, if he could get to the blocks. . . right now, Mani and Joy are pushing him out of the way so they can play.

Mike ‘n’ Mike was born during those days when I took Yanni and Xay to swimming four nights a week, and Curtis stayed home with the Mani and Joy. That would have been 2003 or so. Curtis noticed that the girls didn’t play with each other, and he set out to teach them how. He and Mani started talking about the blocks, and they started naming them. The baby duplo set came with two little people. You know the lego people, they are yellow, with either a circle or a line for a mouth. Very geometric. The baby duplo blocks are much rounder than your average lego, though, so these people are kind of round and pudgy, like weeblos. (Ed. note: Mike and Mike are stars of Xay’s first film, The Crash).

One has light brown hair, and one has dark brown hair, and they are wearing different colors. Curtis asked Mani what one of the guy’s names was. She answered, “Mike.” Then he asked her what the other guy’s name was, and she answered, “Mike.” Then they had the stories and the adventures of Mike and Mike.

At the time, the children were all big on this CD-Rom game they got from the cereal box. The Candy Land CD-Rom game played differently from the board game. They had a whole atmosphere part that had nothing to do with the game. That’s what the children liked. So, they would click on the bad guy, and he’d say something like, “Ouch! That hurts!” And they thought that was hilarious, and they’d do that several times in a row.

There was a side character in the game called Grandma Nut. She’d talk to the children and have them color lollypops, or something. Mani just loved Grandma Nut. In fact, she printed out pictures of her without any help, or permission.

The Primo set came with a flower covered block that had a rattle inside. Mani named it Grommanot, and Curtis gave it a flower people accent. She was a hippy. I couldn’t figure out where that name came from. I thought it was more creative than the other names. She’d named the blue seal Dora, and the white penguin was named Addison, after a character in a movie we’d just seen, All About Eve.

There are three yellow blocks with a puzzle of a giraffe on one side, a palm tree on the other side. Mani named them Francis. There’s a yellow elephant named Bud. There’s a frog, too, which came from the Primo set that Uncle Fellah had bought for Xay. The Frog is named Jack.

I was still puzzling over that Grommanot name when I stumbled upon a page Mani had printed out from that Candy Land game. It was a picture of Grandma Nut. I asked Mani, and sure enough, that’s what she was saying when she said Grommanot!

Curtis taught Mani and Joy to play together with Mike ‘n’ Mike. He’d have one girl play with one Mike, and another girl could play with the other Mike. And someone could be Francis, and someone could be Dora. Mani usually wanted Bud for herself. Joy learned to put the blocks together, and they built buses, and houses, and merry-go-rounds, and towers, and whatever they desired. And we’d talk about the adventures of Mike ‘n’ Mike even when we weren’t playing with them. That helped me to learn all the names.

When Joy turned 2, she got her own set of giant mega blocks from Grammy. It had two little guys in it. Mani immediately named them Jake and Jake. These blocks came with their own wagon, which was used as a ride-on toy or baby buggy, and who knows what all they tried to do with that handle? It didn’t hold the blocks well, though, and that set eventually got absorbed into the bigger yellow box of mega blocks that Xay had gotten from Gammy years earlier.

That was the box of blocks I used to teach Joy how to build. It was a swimming toy. Before Curtis started watching the little girls during swimming, I used to take them and that large box of blocks to swimming. We’d sit and build by the hour, as the children swam back and forth, dropping and keeping their times.

Joy learned how to put the blocks together, and Mani learned how to make intricate buildings and roads, or whatever. I am fascinated by the form of a box. I make variations of this every time I build something. Xay, on the other hand, will turn the blocks on their side and make things I could never imagine. He got finished swimming before Yanni, and he’d get out and make all kinds of Mechs, or robots, and he’d show me how, and then we’d fight them. The person who destroyed the other person’s robot wins. I lost every time, even though I tried to build strong structures. Xay would buffet my feeble creations, and they’d crumble in my hands. It seemed like a waste of creativity to me. But Xay could continue to build these monsters.

I’m grateful to Mel for this. Our neighbor, Mel is almost two years older than Xay, and he comes over often to play with him. Xay was not much interested in legos and had no interest in the duplos from his baby days, when Mel came over with a box full of the toddler blocks. Mel showed Xay this game of building fighting machines and then pitting them against each other. Xay found a large collection of duplos at a garage sale, and he added them to our small collection. I had bought the single duplo set for Yanni when she was a toddler, and had meant to buy more over the years, but nobody in our home had been very interested in them.

Xay’s duplo play led to the smaller legos, and also bionicles. Xay had several sets of bionicles, complex fighter robot sets that look like demons. We decided we didn’t want to keep a bunch of demon looking toys, so Xay gave them to Mel. Xay has since gotten several different lego collection sets, and mega block sets. He will build the set without help, and keep it as long as he can, before a little sister breaks it. Once a project is broken, the legos get put in a huge plastic box.

The latest lego project is a fighter plane Xay bought. It is actually a mega blocks set, and I think it is still intact. I keep meaning to buy some spray glue to keep this together. It would make a good decoration in his room.

This reminds me of the days when the Lego Mindstorm worked. Curtis’ friend Todd had bought the computer lego system and then gotten bored with it, so he gave it to us. Xay and I went through the book together and made the robots they suggested. Since it had an electronic brain, we could actually make them move. I remember sitting in the family room with Yanni, Curtis, and Xay, and we made the robot together. That might have been before Mani, but I suspect she was here, just not under foot.

Then Xay started making his own creations with the Mindstorm. I think he tried to make a car first, but soon he wanted to make a boat. I thought that might be a good idea, but I didn’t supervise him much, and before I knew it, Xay had put a few blocks around the electronic part, and he wanted to try it out in the bathtub. Well, that fried the brain, it hasn’t worked since. We tried to dry all the parts, but to no avail. We never did get around to replacing it.

After this set, Mommy bought Xay a gear set with a remote control. We made moving robots with this set, also. Mani got to work with this a little bit. It was interesting figuring out how the gears worked together. We made all the robots in the book, and were on to making our own when the motor stopped working. I don’t know whether it fell too many times, or whether the batteries died in the remote, but all it does now is make the sound effects.

When I was a child, we never got much mileage out of legos. They didn’t have the specialized sets then; the tiny blocks were hard to put together and take apart. But I suspect the main reason we didn’t get into them was that we weren’t really allowed to break our toys. The essence of lego play is the brokenness. They come in pieces, and you have to put them together. Then, the things you make are constantly breaking. I think that would be a difficult concept for my mother to take.

I remember that Fellah came to visit once when Yanni and Xay were small. It couldn’t have been later than ’96. He bought this lego castle set, and proceeded to put it together. It took this physicist/engineer/genius hours to put this toy together, and when he was done, and he and Mommy wanted us to glue it together! I told them that was preposterous, that legos were meant to be played with! I took the castle home, determined to ‘fix’ it if it came apart. Well, it did come apart, or maybe Yanni and I took it apart, and we fumbled with it for hours to no avail. Many of the pieces of that castle set are in that plastic box of legos to this day.

I am glad that we took it apart and tried to build it, though. That was the beginning of learning. Yanni and I made a whole doll house from a kit shortly after the castle incident. I’d like to get another kit to assemble with Mani and Joy, too.

Block play is called construction in educationese. I know that education in America is the art of taking the simple (block play) and making the complex (construction), and in the process of analyzing it, making it meaningless. I won’t attempt to do that here. I will want to revisit construction at the end of the parenting journey and see what benefits we gained from it.

For now, I’ll teach Esteban how to play Mike’n'Mike.