Legoland, CA

We went to Legoland for a quick family getaway (I only took off one day, so I can hardly call it a vacation).

We decided to be 'tourists' and take lots of pictures with the sculptures.

And at first they were pretty excited to cooperate with posing.

But after the Bionicle that was it. It was going too slowly when we stopped for so many pictures. With these guys we take what we can get of them together and were happy to get 3 shots.

Oh, and although most of the sculptures are made entirely of legos, the Bionicle above was not. If you think that's cheating - especially in a place called 'Legoland' - they did have some Bionicles in Legos as seen below.

As you can see - no boys posing.

LegoMania

We went to the Chandler Fashion Mall this weekend to check out (and help out with) the Lego event building a large-scale model of a pirate. How large? When finished it was supposed to be 8 feet tall. We never got to see it completed; they tore it down within a couple hours of completing it to ship the pieces to another Lego store. This was as far as we got to see it built.The boys enjoyed making large-scale bricks. The scale model used to build the large model was 1/4 the size of the finished model, so each brick had to be 4 times larger than a typical Lego brick. What fun! Erik worked on bricks for the face. So much of the model is black, Jake spent time on those tables when he wasn't socializing.

Their were volunteers from the Arizona Lego-Builders Association and a master builder to oversee the project. They had some fun things going on to keep spirits up.

There were some races to see who could build the fastest 4x brick. I tried my hand (literally) against a speedy volunteer in a piratey one-handed build. I lost (Arrrgh). They gave away some Lego things and Erik won a Lego bank by guessing that the master builder was thinking of a dragon named - "Puff." He got a little hint from me and more than a little push from me to even raise his hand and suggest it. He gave the bank to Jake.

After being there for quite some time, one of the volunteers challenged Erik to build a ball instead of a brick. Here he is with Dan, the master builder, oohing and ahhing over the ball. Dan was a real character and all the kids enjoyed him.

I would imagine this job ranking right up there with Park Ranger.