Everything Lego is my main motivation for starting this blog. I love it, its a great hobby and pastime that you can share with so many people across the world.
I’m whats known as an AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego), and although it may seem a bit odd to some people that a father of 4 in his forties likes to tinker with little minifigures and build things out of tiny plastic blocks, there is a huge community of people of all ages who have a great appreciation for this fantastic, magical product.
I used to enjoy playing with Lego as a kid, and had the classic Lego Space sets, Knights and Pirates. I used to spend hours playing, building my own creations and letting my imagination run wild playing with my sets, unlocking worlds of opportunity. Then as I got older, I figured I was too old to be playing with toys anymore, and handed my Lego down to my younger siblings.
It wasn’t until my little lad was about 3 or 4 years old that I came back into Lego. I bought him a little set and helped him build it. He really enjoyed this new toy, and working with Daddy to build it, and I loved spending time with him showing him how to follow the instructions to build a set out of all the little bricks. We had so much fun we bought another set, and then another. We loved working together to create all the little sets we for him, and being autistic he loved the routine of following the instructions to achieve the goal of building each set. He rapidly became great at assembling the sets and it gave me a huge sense of pride that I had helped him to find something that he loved doing, and that I loved doing with him.
At first as he was finding his feet with it, I would look out the pieces as he got to each step and give them to him to assemble. I wasn’t long though that Dad wasn’t fast enough at finding the bits and my role was reduced to helping with tricky bits, applying stickers and checking that he was building it correctly. We stayed at this level for a couple of years as he started to get much bigger more complicated sets, and his skills developed.
We started taking an annual trip to Legoland, which we really looked forward to each year, seeing all the amazing builds and having a great couple of days out which would always culminate in a visit to the big shop, where we would spend far too much on all the amazing Lego we would find there, often with a bemused look from Mum.
Then eventually one day it happened. He was building a set while I was at work and he was so in the zone with it that he didn’t want to wait for Dad to come home to apply the stickers, so he decided to try it himself and did a great job of it. From that day on I was no longer required for anything other than really awkward or tricky builds, pressing parts together where more force was required, or checking things over if there was a potential error in the build. I had been effectively retired from what had become our joint passion for so many years.
What was I to do now? In the last seven or eight years Lego had become such a big part of our relationship, and a hobby that we had both been enjoying. We would still spend hours talking about Lego and looking at all the great sets that he wanted to get, but I was no longer getting to tinker.
This is when I started looking at some of the other sets available, the Brickheadz and Modular Buildings particularly caught my eye. Also being a huge Harry Potter fan these sets were also very interesting, although my son already had many of them. But surely at my age I was too old for Lego?
Well it turned out I was not even half way there yet, there were many sets with 4-99 years written on them, so I still had a good 59 years or so before I’d out grow Lego. I started buying myself the occasional little set, and then it escalated into a bit of an obsession, as I realised that there is a whole community of adult fans of lego (AFOL’s) of which I am definitely one.
