LEGO® Minifigure Magic: Father-Son Adventures Unleashed!

LEGO® Story #25

My name is Benjamin Rummens and this is my LEGO® story. 

As a child, I played hours and hours with the lovely bricks alongside my brothers. I stopped playing as an adult ,  but when I bought the Queen Ann’s Revenge LEGO® set for the 5th birthday of my son Noah… it all came back. 

I have always been busy artistically –  as an artist first (I studied plastic Arts) and most recently as a street and circus performer.  Two years ago I got the idea to make my vacation pictures a bit more creative – and in every picture you could see a dad with his two sons. 

During the last few months, due to COVID,  all my shows have been cancelled – so we got back to the idea. What about taking creative pictures of LEGO® minifigures in real-world situations.

So my youngest son Janosh and I started the project again, just with much more details and with many more minifigures than before. Because we have a big collection of them the possibilities are endless!

Sometimes people on the street find me and my son quite strange,  when they see us laying there belly flat on the ground with a minifigure. But we don’t really care, it is our moment – and we are making other people laugh. 

So everyday we try to take a new picture, and it is very interesting because we really start to look differently to our environment and notice. It is like a never ending quest, and we didn’t even start to use the figures of Lord of the Rings

We will keep adding more and more minifigure adventures in our page and I hope they inspire people to be creative. Even with the constraints of a pandemic, creativity will always win!

Benjamin Rummens, Belgium

Generación LEGO® Pandemial

LEGO® Story #24

Tengo que confesar que nunca había jugado (o montado) un LEGO® en mi vida hasta este año. Tuvo que llegar una pandemia para forzarme a mí misma a enfrentarme a cientos de mini piezas con optimismo. Siempre me pareció un juego para “freaks”, por favor no enfadarse con una servidora, desconocía totalmente este mundo.

Hace más de un año, los amigos del colegio de toda la vida me regalaron por mi cumpleaños la caja de LEGO® de la cafetería de la archi-famosa serie Friends, mi serie preferida de todos los tiempos. He de decir que miré la caja y pensé inmediatamente que quedaría muy bien en mi trastero, donde la encontraría dentro de 20 años cubierta de polvo. Y eso sucedió, estuvo olvidada encima de un armario durante meses.

Mientras tanto, pasaron las Navidades, y a mi hija de dos años los Reyes Magos le trajeron un palacio de hielo de Frozen de Duplo. Y ahí empezó a despertar mi interés, me dije: “vaya, puedo montar un edificio bastante mono de 5 piezas”. De ahí pasé a un trenecito para niños de más de 3, y poco más.

Entonces llegó Semana Santa, la más triste de mi vida hasta el momento, confinados totalmente, solamente se permitían las actividades esenciales, y encima llovía. Con una niña pequeña en casa, no había manualidades suficientes en YouTube como para pasar el rato, y además no se podían hacer pasteles porque ¡no había levadura en ninguna tienda! Y fue entonces cuando me acordé de la caja: “¿y si nos enfrentamos a esto?”, le dije a mi marido, “estás loca”, me respondió él. Pero logré convencerle y aunque nos costó ordenar las piezas y encontrar un mecanismo de trabajo, finalmente dimos con la clave. Separar bien las bolsas, no permitir que se mezclen, ordenar por color y tamaño, y utilizar a nuestra hija como asistente para que nos fuese pasando las “fichitas”. Dos tardes de 4 horas cada una, bastante entretenidas, en las que el tiempo pasó volando, un resultado final muy satisfactorio, y por supuesto, la foto final de Instagram molona.

Photo by author

Después de esta experiencia, no paro de buscar nuevos retos LEGO®, por si las moscas. Compré una caja gigante tipo “ladrillito rosa de LEGO®” y ahí guardamos todas las fichas Duplo. Y a decir verdad, ahora casi todas las tardes juego un ratito con mi hija a construir carreteras, palacios o lo que se tercie.

Dicen que la generación “pandemial”, a la que pertenecerán mis dos hijas, crecerá acostumbrada al distanciamiento social. Espero que no sea así, pero en cualquier caso, siempre les quedarán los recuerdos de jugar a montar construcciones LEGO® en las tardes más duras de la pandemia

Isabel Salazar – Madrid

Designing a Dream Display: A Custom LEGO® Wall

LEGO® Story #20

LEGO® has always been a part of my life. As young as 3 years old I was playing with it. My father traveled a lot when I was young and, back in those days, the only toy available at airports was LEGO®. I used to wait for him to come home, not just to see him, but to see what LEGO® he had found.

As I grew older, I moved through the various genres of the brick, from town and space through the electronic train and into Technic. I have always been an early riser and my mother said she always knew when I was awake because she could hear the LEGO® being rummaged through.

I was never someone that played with LEGO®, I was always purely a builder. Nothing was ever finished so there was no time to swoop the spaceship through the air, I could always see how it could be improved or that it needed a landing pad or support truck.

Laurence Woolford

By the time I was 13 and moving into being a teenager I had amassed quite a collection and had a permanent LEGO® layout in my room. My move to boarding school started my path into adulthood and I put my LEGO® into several large storage boxes and hid them in my parents’ loft. It was not until years later with the birth of my 3 children that my LEGO® was recovered, and I started an entirely new relationship with my lost youth.

Laurence Woolford

I delighted in teaching them how to build but would find myself staying up late into the night building. Buying LEGO® for them and spending time building reconnected me with lots of happy memories and feelings from my youth which helped me through 2 nasty divorces. I can remember at the end of my first marriage building a huge Eagle Transporter from Space 1999 that was minifigure scale and over a meter long.

As my children grew away from LEGO®, LEGO® became more and more a part of my life. I used building as time to think and reflect. I was never happier than building, listening to an audio book and letting my mind wonder over all the problems of my life. My LEGO® was listed in my second divorce and I nearly lost my 1st Edition Millennium Falcon! Fortunately, I have managed to hold onto it although it was destroyed and had to be rebuilt from scratch!

Now a bachelor, and still a big kid, I have embraced my LEGO® heritage. It is a huge part of my life. I have a “mini figure me” the travels all over the world with me and has been to some amazing places from Maputo to Burma. It always gets a huge smile when I set him up to take a picture.

Laurence Woolford

During the recent renovation of my home I was determined to make LEGO® a permanent part of the building, making a corner of a garden wall a feature to look like the entire wall was LEGO®. It is this that has inspired me to build a LEGO® house into the corner wall of the kitchen. The house is about to have all the windows changed so my LEGO® room is packed up but I do have some of my favourite pieces on display in the downstairs toilet!

Laurence Woolford – United Kingdom.

How I Became an Adult Fan of LEGO® (AFOL)

LEGO® Story #16

I spent my childhood as many other kids – building with LEGO® a lot. I think it was my favorite toy.

Since I had a few health problems early on, I was not that active as other kids at my age. So my favourite past-time was LEGO®.

I got older and maybe in my father’s eyes I should have had other interests beside LEGO®. So my dad told me to pack it away – and the plan became to give it away to the child hospital ward where I had been a few times. After this happened, I felt for a long time that my dad didn’t want me to play with LEGO®.

You may think that my LEGO® Dark Ages came – the time where I had to quit playing with LEGO® and find other interests. But no, my LEGO® building passion went into Technic sets. It was more a young adult type of LEGO®. I only bought large sets that I liked and built – and then would hide them away in the basement.

Around 2012, I found myself at a LEGO® crossroads. Should I keep building the new Technic sets or quit building LEGO® altogether? I think the one thing preventing me from quitting were the Modular House sets. I bought the Pet store and I was hooked. Oh how I missed that little brick – my love for LEGO® was back. 

And the LEGO® that was supposed to be given away, was still in my basement.

So in late 2012, I found my way to the local LEGO® User Group (LUG). They had an event coming up soon in Trondheim, a city in another part of my country. Having never been to any LEGO® events, I decided to attend. I didn’t have the courage to tell my father I was going to a LEGO® event. I had a feeling that it would not end well, so I just told him ‘I’m going to Trondheim’. But when I posted the LEGO® event on Facebook, my dad saw it – and the cat was out of the bag. But, to my surprise, he took it well and told me that I was more than old enough to decide my own hobbies. E even offered to give me a lift to LEGO® events!

And then I took an extra step. Some colleagues at work knew about my LEGO® hobby.

One day in 2014, I got an idea to turn some of my work into a LEGO® model. I was servicing the rent bike racks. So, I made a model based on that in LEGO® –  a rack, and the two service cars.

I later showed a picture of this to my manager – a few moments later it was posted to everyone in the company. I was not that happy about that but OK – at least I could finally tell everyone about my hobby.

This is my trip from packing my LEGO® away in a basement… to becoming a proud Adult Fan of LEGO®. Today I have fun with LEGO®, building my own creations and collecting sets. I no longer have worries about my father. My mother loved LEGO® from the start and my father learned to accept it.

LEGO® helped me in so many ways. And that’s why, still today, it is my favorite toy in the whole wide world.

Petter L – Norway

My favorite LEGO® MOC

LEGO Story #15 – Guy Gabizon

For those of you that don’t know what is a LEGO® MOC, it stands for My Own Creation.

Normally you can buy LEGO® sets in a box with instructions. A MOC is something that a fan like  me designs and then publishes the instructions for other LEGO® Fans to build, on sites like Rebrickable

Photo credit: Guy Gabizon

I love designing and sharing MOC’s with the world. I design them because I can really use my creativity and build something out of my own imagination. And I have built already more than 500 of them!

My favorite one is the Dessert Village one. I built it from 12 different MOC’s, with 3957 pieces. It took me more than one month to build but at the end I was really happy with it. 

If you want to see more of my creations, you can check my website – https://htbi-moc.com/. I love to see when a fellow fan builds one of my MOC’s – and I am looking forward to myself building creations from others!

Guy Gabizon – Israel

The Quest to Find IT

LEGO® Story #14 – By Alexandre Fernandes

When I was 10 years old, I remember playing with my few LEGO® sets until exhaustion.  Every Christmas, I eagerly waited for the catalogues from the big retail stores, showcasing all the toys you can imagine. My favorite toys were always RC cars and of course… LEGO®!

One day, I went with my mom to her manager’s house and… I saw IT! An enormous LEGO® Technic set, that I only had seen in the Christmas catalogues booklets… and that I thought I would never see in real life.  ‘IT’ was the 8865 Test Car, laying around… Half on the floor… Half on the box… left abandoned, and worse… I wasn’t authorized to play with IT! 

That day, I secretly promised myself – ‘One Day I will have IT! Meanwhile (unfortunately…) I grew up, and went into my LEGO® dark ages, years went by and LEGO® became just a fading memory. just a memory and fade!

Years later, when I was already an adult,  my inner geek started to come out again when I started watching The Big Bang Theory. When my girlfriend gave The Big Bang Theory LEGO® ideas set, I rediscovered the world of LEGO® again!

This year I turned 40. And one night, after putting my 2-year old daughter to sleep, I went on Ebay to look for my next LEGO® set. And I stumbled upon it… a second-hand 8865 Test car! With so many memories coming back to me I decided – I have to have IT! 

Photo credit: Alexandre Fernandes

And as I write this story, I am bringing its yellow aged bricks back to vibrant colors – and I can’t wait to build IT… Finally.

Alexandre Fernandes – Caldas da Rainha, Portugal

A carta que recebi da LEGO®

LEGO® Story #13

Em 2017, para os meus 40 anos, a minha esposa quis oferecer-me algo épico. E algo épico para mim, só podia ser LEGO®.

E em 2017 era um ano importante – os meus 40 anos de idade e os 40 anos do começo da saga do Star Wars! Entao, nada melhor do que comemorar as duas datas com o melhor presente de sempre – a LEGO® UCS Millenium Falcon.

No entanto, o set estava esgotado e não chegaria a tempo do meu aniversário. Quando a minha mulher escreveu à LEGO® a pedir se eles poderiam entregar a tempo, em resposta recebi esta carta.

Até hoje, dos melhores serviço ao cliente que conheço.
E a  LEGO® Millenium Falcon foi o meu melhor presente de sempre!

Fabrice Carvalho – Lisbon, Portugal

Os LEGO® que eu montava com o meu pai

LEGO® Story #12

Eu e o meu pai sempre fomos os melhores amigos e os melhores companheiros de brincadeiras.

Das memórias mais felizes que tenho foi num Natal em que os meus pais fizeram um esforço enorme para me dar uma coleção de LEGO® que eu adorava – uma casa de família repleta de flores. Ainda hoje recordo com carinho a paciência que o meu pai tinha para me ajudar a montar as flores, naquela estrutura verde tão pequenina que as minhas mãos pequenas e desengonçadas não conseguiam segurar.

Photo Credit: CMateus

Tenho os meus LEGO® guardados para que um dia possa ajudar uma criança minha a montar cada um deles de novo.

CMateus – Lisbon, Portugal

Experience Sky-High Thrills: Unveiling Benny B’s LEGO® Plane Adventure

LEGO Story #11 – By Benny B.

Bet you didn’t know LEGO® was available for purchase on flights a long time ago.

My family took a plane ride on one particular vacation. However, back in 1988 there was no in-flight entertainment.  So how did my mother calm her increasingly annoying bored child?

She bought me my first LEGO® set ever to keep me occupied.

Colors have faded & lost pieces replaced along the way, but the spirit remains.

Benny B – New Jersey, USA

Unlocking the Magic of LEGO®

LEGO Story #10 – Raquel Lemos

I don’t remember building LEGO® while growing up. Never felt particularly drawn to it but – like with Scouting – I always thought I’d love for my kids to try.  You always want them to be the best version of themselves that they want, right?

When we went to other kids’ places, not much interest in LEGO®, at all.

But at home, she received her first LEGO® at 4 – a kit with guided mini-builds. A fun own-time with mommy, the final result displayed in her bookshelf, but not coming across as a big passion.

Then Corona came, and I attended an online event at work with the LEGO® Serious Play methodology.

Illustrating her emotions around the virus through LEGO®, but mostly competing with fellow co-workers’ kids for the tallest LEGO® tower, brought both excitement and tears. It was her competitiveness that was her catapult to LEGO® – go figure!! Your kids are their own person, and that’s so good!

Photo credit: Raquel Lemos

So now we’re growing into LEGO® (and DUPLO®), all girls in the family, with story-telling and creative stops in the builds as their rightful demands.

They’re on the lead, I enable. 🙂 It turns out it’s fun and kind and sharing and opening windows. It can be a lot.

Looking forward to the next episodes with my girls.

Raquel Lemos – Malmö, Sweden

My Fondest LEGO® Memory

LEGO® Story #9

When I was 10, my dad went on a business trip to Las Vegas. 

Before he left his hotel for his return flight, he decided to play blackjack with $50 and got very lucky. When he returned home, he brought us to Walmart and told us we could pick out whatever we wanted! 

I went to the LEGO® aisle and got the #6520 – Mobile Outpost and #6579 – Ice Surfer. THE ICE SURFER – the coolest set!

As a 10 year old, it was the greatest night of my life. My family was very frugal, and they never spoiled us kids, so it’s the only time something like that ever happened. Receiving a LEGO® set outside of a birthday or Christmas was unheard of. Which made that night all the more special. 

It is by far my fondest memory. I still have those two sets in pieces and I am now trying to put them back together.

Blaine K – Florida, USA