For his 5th birthday, my son received the Lego B-Wing model. It's so cool, I don't blame him for begging his grandparents for it. Of course, who has to put this thing together? Yup, Mommy & Daddy. We're on it. We love building Lego kits. Our son is still a bit too young to be of any real assistance, but he "helps" anyway.

The B-Wing comes complete with 2 small figures - a pilot & some other guy in a leather cap. I'm guessing it's the guy who runs the landing platform, but whatever. Padawan-Wan says it Nien Nunb, so that's who it is forever more. That is of course until his head & arms & legs are ripped off and combined with other figure parts like some Lego SW Frankenstein monsters. I can already foresee that the leather cap will be snapped on to someone he'll eventually call Princess Leia, but whatever. He's happy: we're happy.

We start our project by sorting the pieces by color. Black, dark grey, grey, beige, yellow & then of course the various bits & pieces that come with it - a visor to the pilot's helmet, cockpit canopy, lights and my favorite: a wheel of miniature tools. Yup, a WHEEL!!! It was so cool, you had to break the tools off this wheel thing. Awesome. That kept Padawan-Wan busy for a total of 5 minutes, it was so worth it.

We begin. The first couple of pages are no problem whatsoever for us, we are able to build what is looking like the mechanism to hold everything together - the 3 wings & cockpit. Snap this here, find this little piece goes over there, no problemo. The -Wan's are on a roll. That is until we turn a page to find a picture of what looks to be a tiny white rubberband. We stare & stare at the page. Is that a rubberband? we wonder. Looks like it. But we didn't get one with the kit, did we? We must have, they wouldn't trust a couple of schmucks like us to come up with a tiny rubberband that fits around the mechanism exactly right. Right? Right.

So we proceed to search our work space. Where are we working on this model? At the dining room table, a flat surface with plenty of overhead light? C'mon, you guys know me better than that by now. Of course we're sitting on the floor in the living room, plush cream colored carpet, bad lighting, and the topper, a child dancing around us anxious for his Lego to be finished.

We have to be methodical about the search - look through the empty box & the plastic bags that once held all the tiny pieces. We ran our hands over the carpet in hopes of this little rubber band turning up. Asked the padawan if he by any chance picked it up. We could just picture him whipping it at the cat.

Nothing.

Now we're starting to get frantic. How did we lose this thing? Hubby-Wan even went through our garbage thinking he'd accidentally thrown it out thinking it was part of the packaging. We crawled the entire length of the living room/dining room/kitchen on our hands and knees looking for this thing.

Nothing.

I decided to clear my mind. Finding the rubber band would be easy - just use the Force. No problem, I'm on it. I take a deep breath & walk slowly from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room. I felt the sudden urge to stop walking and look down. I looked down by my feet and sure enough, I found something! The rubberband we were looking for?

Of course not!!

I found a NEEDLE!! An actual real live needle on the floor. I don't know where this thing came from, I don't sew - I can barely put buttons back on shirts when they fall off, so I can't explain how a needle ended up on the floor. But it made us laugh. There's that old saying, "Like finding a needle in a haystack." Well, we thought it was hilarious that we found a needle in the carpet while looking for something else.

This kept us laughing for quite sometime. Not long after this we found the rubber band. It was actually wrapped around another piece - looks like it was done at the factory, you know, so it wouldn't get lost? We completed the whole model in about an hour with the two of us working together. Yes, together, not bickering like 12 year olds. We did it. It's probably one of the coolest Lego models we've constructed for the padawan. AND it has already survived 19 hours without dropping a single piece. Gets an A+++ in my book!!

Now get out there & build something!!




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EXPLOSION UPDATE:

Your patience has been rewarded, an explosion of the B-Wing has occurred!!!

The B-Wing itself is very sturdy and is holding up well to a 5-year-old's play habits. The few pieces that have broken off (like the guns at the ends of the wings) are easy enough for him to reattach OR build into something new, like the bazooka I discovered Obi-Wan carrying on Saturday.

But the landing platform..... ahh.... the landing platform.....
Saturday 7:30am: I was enjoying a lazy morning, slowly waking up while the padawan played happily in his bedroom down the hall. Most of the time you can't hear many sounds from his room other than him talking or singing or humming (which he does constantly, it's like a homing beacon or something!), but there is one sound that can cut through the closed bedroom door like no other : the sound of LEGO's crashing to the play table.

I decided to ignore it, roll over, pull the covers over my head. It could be any number of LEGO kits breaking to pieces in there, but the B-Wing being the newest meant that I'd have to pull out the manual to help me repair it. I prayed that it was Anakin's Jedi Fighter - i'm highly skilled in that kit.

Nope, I went in after a few minutes to find the landing platform of the B-Wing in pieces. The Padawan was holding a few of them together in the hopes I wouldn't notice that it was broken. "See?" he said, "I fixed it!" Nope, not a chance kid.

I didn't feel much like helping him repair it at that point because it was more entertaining to watch him try to manipulate all the tiny pieces with his little kid hands. He hadn't destroyed it fully, the general "idea" of the landing platform was still intact. He worked very hard to put the broken off pieces back on, but like any good LEGO hobbyist, he managed to completely destroy the rest of it trying to put those few pieces back in place.

By the time he was finished "repairing" the landing platform, we had a pile of yellow bricks, a pile of grey bricks, a pile of black bricks, and several small miscellaneous pieces lying about.

Excellent.... explosion achieved...

And mommy still hasn't fixed it....