A lego story.

First, I'm going to ask you to revisit this post from about 18 months ago. Have you read it? Good. Now, fast forward to the present. Imagine that same room, with those same shelves and those same drawers only now the shelves are even *more* packed (at least three times as much stuff, honest) and there's a large contingent of sets along the long wall on the floor *and* there's that full size folding table in the middle of the room that is literally overflowing and has all of the floor space beneath it packed with lego sets as well...like this:

(This was taken two months ago, though. It's gotten more crowded since then somehow.) You'll have to imagine the rest of the room, as I neglected to take pictures this week. Sorry. ;)

And then, yesterday, we had a Christmas miracle of sorts. ;) We decided to attempt to *clean* the room. Our reasoning was that it was embarrassing how many legos the boys have and that obviously Santa and grandparents wouldn't be inclined to bring them any more legos for Christmas if there wasn't any space left in the room, right? 

(Also, because we're wanting to add yet more shelving in the room to get rid of the table in the middle so that the boys can actually play *in* the room, rather than just using it for storage and then bringing legos all over the house. And we'll need to clean out the room in order to get in there to put up the shelving.)

So. For hours (yes, many hours), the boys and I sorted and sorted that room. The boys managed to weed out pieces that they'd been hoarding in "their" areas (each boy had a few designated areas in the room) and consolidate their collections to fit mostly on the shelves in the closet only:

Noah still has a good swath of floor space covered as well, but I suppose he's been collecting slightly longer than his brothers. (He's also more of a hoarder, lol.) But, look! You can see the floor and not with a big table filling the middle of the room:

(By the time I went to take pictures this morning, the boys had already begun construction on a few new creations...) The left portion of this picture represents about half of the length of the room (the rest of which is similarly lined with legos).

Beyond the shelves and the floor space along the length of the room, we also have this:

Yes, there are six tubs filled with "extra" pieces (not counting the box of lego train sets, the box of lego mindstorm pieces and the two lego sets in two gallon bags (a soccer set and a safari like race track)) along with a tray of just minifigure pieces. And, yes, the boys will be getting more legos for Christmas (we did try to scale back this year and were mostly successful, but each boy also shops for each brother and, thus, legos were purchased despite our attempts to avoid that, lol). Whew.

And, just because, here's a fun little picture from this morning:

It's the Santa Yoda from this morning's Lego Star Wars advent calendar (how cute is he?!) and the *single* pink lego piece I found in the entire lego room last night. (Yes, I'm crazy like that and actually did dump out and sort through all six of those tubs of extra pieces to make sure non-lego things weren't in there and to pull minifigure pieces out.) I find that funny. ;)

In any case, thus ends our little lego story for the time being. Embarrassing but true. And there is once again space in the lego room for new additions...just in time for Christmas. ;) 

Also, does anyone know of something cheap that sounds like legos when shaken? I've pretty much given up on trying to disguise the fact that there are legos inside the package when wrapping gifts...but at least they have no idea which legos, right? ;)