HOUSE PARTY

There are things that I am not good at putting together, namely things from Ikea, and things that are lego.  So when my son got a spaceship lego kit for Christmas, I tried to put off making it for as long as possible.  But tonight was the night of reckoning (after hearing my son ask me enough times where I finally gave in), and I pulled the lego box out to finally put together.

What the spaceship was supposed to look like

 At one point, my son did take one of the bags of pieces out of the box and we lost it.  So I already know this is going to be even more difficult than it needs to be.

As we are trying to follow the directions, and finding replacement pieces in his huge box of legos, my son finally looks at me and says something that I hadn't even considered as we did this.  Something that was so freeing, so simple.  He said:

"It's okay if it isn't perfect, daddy."

it was at that point that I stopped trying to do every little part according to the instructions, and we started having fun!  We added extra wings, more people, bigger windows, and made the coolest spaceship ever.

NASA has nothing on this beast

I realized that I was so concerned that the ship was perfect, that I forgot why we were doing it in the first place.  My son wanted to play legos with me.  He didn't care about decals on the side of the ship or that the nose cone wasn't the right shape.  He just wanted my time, perfect or not.

Not quite the same ship

Oh, and when I put together IKEA furniture, it does end up looking much more like the picture on the box.