While I was growing up, Lego sets were really boring and uninteresting to me mostly because the directions for specific build sets weren’t items I wanted.
I’m talking about the basic pirate, knights or city job sets that had you constructing a castle or lame vehicles.
As Lego finally started expanding into various pop culture fandoms, I found myself wondering if the chance of stepping on one of those sharp building blocks was worth the risk for a scaled construct that had several hundred pieces to sift through.
To be fair, I finally found my focus on the now-defunct “Monster Hunters” series that married my favorite Halloween creepy crawlies and a smattering of glow-in-the-dark pieces together.
In fact, I got a few of those sets and now have them doubling as decorations when we have the space and I’ve got the time to arrange everything into the perfect diorama.
Still, it wasn’t until the company finally expanded into things like botanicals, copies of famous artwork like the Mona Lisa, and other unique sets that I started curating a few wishlists to share with family and friends when my birthday and Christmas holiday rolled around.
One of such building sets was the Lego “Mineral Collection” that I received last year at Christmas.
I’m sad to say that I didn’t complete it until a few free hours weeks ago – and even then it was only due to three factors!
For me, I know that my ADHD will strike if I leave any arts and crafts or building projects unfinished for more than an hour.
I also know that I work better with background music to help keep my focus on track and I need to have the space to work without interruptions.
And, lastly, my sister Ashlee’s threats to steal the boxed set before I could work on it because I was taking “too long” to do it in her book!
So a rare free night after dinner was just the perfect recipe for me to complete the set!
I think I completed it in roughly four hours, which given that the set was 880 pieces to work together across three different instruction booklets, was a bit more than I expected to deal with initially.
Still, it gave me that sense of pride upon completion and now it’s also shelved into a lit cubby as a decorative piece.
I will admit that my thumbs were a bit sore once I was done and I worried I had bruised my right one, but my excitement wasn’t dampened much by that at all.
In fact, I spent an extra hour after I was done to survey what possible new builds were going to be released by the company soon.
I also found a few items on my wishlists that were marked down and have been tracking those prices to make sure I get the best deal.
As far as a crafting medium goes, Legos are relatively easy and the reward or return on investment when everything is all said and done is more gratifying than something like diamond paintings.
I’m still ignoring my unfinished Halloween diamond painting from last year because the prospect of continuing to place those itty-bitty plastic gems on a paint-by-number-esque background is far more tedious to my ADHD brain than Legos.
In fact, I’m more than half-tempted to let my sister complete that project instead and possibly pay a Starbucks bribe for her trouble.
After all, she actually LIKES those diamond painting projects.
