The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.