The Young and The Restless | Lego-es and comes around

By Bree Harding

Mar 25, 2025

Eleven years ago a typewriter collection was started with an antique American Underwood, made almost 100 years ago, in 1926. This year, a little plastic Scandinavian block-built typewriter, complete with moving parts, was added. Photo by Bree Harding

When my kids were toddlers, I had their toys on rotation in massive plastic tubs.

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Three kids who had three birthdays, a Christmas and Easter every 12 months meant a quick accumulation of noise-making, primary-coloured playthings.

But, if I kept it all out permanently, they’d still somehow get bored with the selection and become harder to entertain each day.

By switching the selection out every few weeks, old toys became new again and there was no temptation to buy more junk that would one day end up in landfill.

They grew.

And they grew out of those oversized tripping hazards.

Then one day, they were old enough to be trusted not to eat Lego.

This was, of course, after two false starts, resulting in two trips to the hospital.

Once, middle child inhaled a 3.1cm Lego firetruck pole through a straw that luckily — for him — didn’t get ejected sideways on its way out the other end.

Unluckily for his father and I, we had the task of inspecting what did come out to make sure it had passed so that no surgery was required.

Another time, youngest child snorted a Nano block that got wedged high in his nasal cavity and required tweezers longer than I owned to extract it.

I mean, I’m sure my tweezers were long enough, but he probably just needed the stern voice of a doctor urging him to sit still throughout the procedure so I didn’t perform accidental brain surgery on him.

The universe — or the neighbours at least — know he doesn’t listen to me!

Lego has an extensive range these days. Photo by Bree Harding

Anyway, we once had a large three-station Lego table custom-built by their father taking up a good part of our lounge room.

It was a beauty. It had three open, deep sections to store Lego, each lined in a different coloured fabric to help the kids identify which was theirs, and three large raised block building bases.

There was even a concealed cavity for instruction manuals.

But the best part about it was the lid that could be placed on top and hide all the ‘mess’, disguising it as nothing more than a gigantic coffee table, which would have been a great base for assembling 2000-piece jigsaw puzzles if anyone in my house had the attention span to do so.

The kids grew some more and their focus shifted to other toy types, mostly technology-based or outdoorsy.

The Lego-slash-coffee table remained, unused, taking up an almost annoying amount of floorspace.

One day I decided I’d shinned myself on it while vacuuming one too many times and convinced the boys to let me sell it, promising the proceeds would be divvied up three ways seeing as they owned the table, which was once a Christmas gift to them.

As I helped the buyer lift it into his ute and watched him drive it away, a slight pang of regret felt physical as my mind realised another era of my kids’ childhood was over.

That was a couple of years ago.

But now, Lego has made a return.

It’s like the ebbs and flows of Minecraft’s popularity with my kids.

They don’t play it for a year, you think it’s a thing of the past, and the next minute they’re building extensive worlds with their friends every night after school again.

I’ve always thought Lego was a quality toy.

It’s well-made, inventive and some of the sets are really cleverly designed.

Lego’s camera was a cool build I was happy to receive as a gift. So long as someone else built it for me. Photo by Bree Harding

It keeps kids happily busy for lengthy times, inspires creativity and fosters fine motor skills, patience and procedural instruction comprehension.

My kids took my approval of it as a hint that I actually wanted to build it myself and once they were making their own money, started buying me sets for birthday and Christmas gifts.

I didn’t want to come across as ungrateful, but I had to break the news to them that while I was impressed by finished builds and loved their passion for the Danish invention, I had no desire to dedicate my own time to building even the simplest of sets.

In fact, it appealed about as much as piecing together that 2000-bit jigsaw puzzle I mentioned earlier.

So, I gave them permission to buy me only the sets they were willing to build for me.

It seemed a win-win arrangement.

Then, something unexpected happened.

Lego released a Creator set with three build options — a block-building pick-a-path if you will — that included a typewriter.

Despite going to Kmart that night to buy a gift for someone else, this word nerd with a steadily growing collection of typewriter things was compelled to treat herself.

And you know what?

I built it myself.