Blast from the past

Do you or your kids have favorite toys from their childhoods that bring back great memories? And maybe even cause some big kid play time?

My girls both loved Lego blocks as kids, and also still love playing with Legos with their own children.  I never had Legos as a kid but really enjoyed building with them with one of my younger cousins at his house.  In fact when he turned 40 several years ago I sent him a big Lego set as a birthday present.

At my house, ALL of the Legos from their childhood are in a couple of big containers. The grandkids (5 of them all 8 and under) pull those out almost immediately when they are here.  And I have a huge round coffee table in the family room that makes a perfect building site.  

We had some elaborate sets when my girls were kids, but never kept the instruction books unfortunately, so once they were taken apart that was it. My younger daughter's family was here over the weekend and we found the instructions online for a Lego castle the kids were finding parts for. So a fairly simple Google search happened and we found exactly what we needed. Note: I've now had to start a file folder to keep the instructions we printed. 

Next thing I knew my daughter and her 2 kids were sitting on the floor sorting ALL of those Legos by color.  And the next step was building the castle.  Piles of red, yellow, blue, white, brown, black were joined by piles of "people" pieces and odd things like swords or tiny little pizzas. 

Once that was done, we found instructions for a couple of other things that we built as well. The funny thing about the castle is that this was a set that I bought for myself (in my mid 30s) and it sat on a shelf for years. My girls always laugh about the fact that I didn't let them play with it - but that they did anyway. They just made sure to put it back together so I wouldn't get mad.  This morning this castle is sitting on the fireplace mantel. 

We definitely have 3 generations of Lego lovers in the family.