"I'd rather be the king of kids, than the prince of fools."

As a family we can spend weeks, months even, planning and building a huge well thought out LEGO build. Which as you are probably fully aware, i absolutely adore as it is quality family time with the boys. I love sitting with them both, hearing all their ideas and then working together to come up with ways to make those ideas possible, it's one of my favourite things to do with them. Sometimes though we don't have an extended amount of time to do this, sometimes the boys need something building there and then and our building becomes a little more spontanious.

The release of the series 13 minifigures has got many LEGO geeks like myself excited, for me this has been the best series in terms of characters and has been great for our ever expanding collection of parts. It happens a lot with us that a single minifigure will spur on a larger build (remember Deadpool?, Wyldstyle? even The Joker got built an entire ice cream factory). This time round though two characters from series 13 gave us all the inspiration we needed.

When we saw the pictures of the series months back i was pining after the Hotdog guy, hes going to come in very handy. For Seth though it was all about the king and after seeing him built i can see why Seth started building a castle straight away. Months back our friend Steve had given us a big bag of castle pieces and Seth had been looking for a reason to get using them. The king minifigure sorted that out.

It wasn't long before Seth had built a castle for the big beard donning king and in what seemed like no time at all an army was being built, a mass of knights and soldiers ready to defend the throne.

Ready to move forward on their enemies, they instantly hit a rather important hurdle...

... they had absolutely no one to fight, which is right about where i got summoned upstairs to their room. In great Seth and Opeie style i was given minimal time to come up with some sort of army for king whats his name to fight and inevitably conquer in the process. I quickly looked about and spotted that Ming the Merciless looking chap from series 13 and decided on a baddie army with a magical element. I love building like this sometimes as i have no idea where to start so i just start literally piling up bricks on a base plate.

I wasn't liking it at first but the more small bricks i added the better it looked. lots of small grey pieces to make an uneven rocky surface and i even managed to use the large skull face piece that i bought years ago for 50p that had been sitting in our grey box (i still have no idea what kit it is off). Spikes on the doors and plenty of fire and it was pretty much everything the boys wanted from a bad guys castle. The female minifigures get a rough deal in our house, unless its Mrs M's minifigure the boys are usually playing with male characters (i am unsure why? could make an interesting future post thought). I made sure i used some as the main part of my army and built witches casting spells around a crystal ball.

Surprisingly since being rushed to complete the castle, we've not actually had the battle yet as the boys keep adding to the castles with new ideas and accessories but i am sure if the weather keeps up like it has there will be plenty of medieval LEGO brawling this weekend... 

...someone has got to save that poor princess locked away in the tower after all.

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."

Hi its Seth I haven't written a post in ages so I decided to write about my LEGO castle I made.

The door at the front is made out of circle pieces because I didn't want to use a door. Through the door there is lots of rooms but first I am going to write about level1. Level 1 doesn't have much in but you can put lots of treasure in it. If you go up the stairs to level 2 that is where you will meet the guards, they are guarding the castle where all the treasure is kept.

In side level 2 there is a treasure storage room there isn't a lot in there. Next to it there is a big jail sell inside it there is bad guys and a bridge. On the bridge there is ropes like a draw bridge.

The canon is to stop enemies attacking it .There is a secret hatch so you can get up and down the steps.

The top is my favourite because it looks like a tree house.

This picture shows that I built it (I love how Seth is making it clear that its his work, they are definitely not the hands of a hand model) .To finish the build i added in lots of minifigures like knights, soldiers, jester, queens guard and a naked viking. even though the guards are good at guarding the castle some soldiers manged to sneak in.

The royal guard dosen't look happy.

The king is guarding the castle on his horse.

 

This is the castle done on the front.

This is a look out tower where the troopers look from, Indiana Jones is keeping watch.

I'm really proud of how it came out and i am now building a pizza shop which i will write about soon. bye x

"A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves."

After getting over the initial shock of the sun being out and it being a lovely looking morning, I decided that We needed to make the most of the weather that was lighting up our back garden. We quickly hopped in the car before there was a sudden change and made our way to Shrewsbury to adventure around the castle and hit the charity shops looking for books.

It was such a nice change for the sun to be lighting up the sky and it put us boys on a great mood. If it hadn't have been for the wind blowing us about we might not have noticed the chill in the air.

We had a walk around the grounds and scaled the castle wall. Opeie had packed an adventure bag for himself, a book to read, some toys and a telescope for just in case, well you never know where we're going to end up.

After investigating the area we sat down to read the book Opeie had chosen for the outing 'what was I scared of?' By Dr Seuss. It was nice to be sitting outside reading and it made me think how much I want to be using the trampoline again this year for lying in the back garden and reading books like last summer.

It wasn't long before my little companion was feeling tired so he hopped on his favourite spot, perched on my shoulders and off we went in search of the car.

But not before helping one of the charity shops part with a few Dr. Seuss classics.

$£%&@!**$%@&.....Brains!!! @£$!%&*£@$&!£@%$&*.......BRAAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNNNNSSSSSSSS!!

We lost a lot of good men today, they may have turned in to flesh eating zombies but they served our team well.

Today was D-day! The morning that Seth had been going on about all week. Excalibur martial arts (seth's Tae Kwon Do class) had organised a Nerf war to celebrate their sons birthday and it seems to be an annual event with these guys. To prepare ourselves for the big day I had brought myself and Seth new weapons as Seth found reloading our other guns difficult due to his muscle condition. I got the guns that could hold the most bullets thinking that would mean less reloading but when they arrived and Seth realised he couldn't load them on his own we had a week of stress and anxiety. Concerned that he would be open to attack it was obviously playing on his mind a lot especially at bedtime (when is he going to understand that best friends stick together and I'll always be his wing man).

They had a nice easy lesson today so that students could conserve their energy for Saturdays main event and as the older children and adults classes follow his we had a couple of hours to kill. Seth has been asking for weeks if he could go on the Bridgnorth cliff railway and our extra time loitering round Bridgnorth made it the perfect filler. We had Seth's friends from school William and Matthew and their dad Steve with us for company which made it more fun. Before going on the cliff railway though we walked along the city walls and admired the one remaining wall of the castle. Seth spotted a cobweb on the railings and with a very serious face asked if it was a medieval spiderweb? Genius!

After our mini adventure and cliff rail ride we headed back to base to prepare for battle. The leisure centre hall had been transformed into a battle zone with cardboard box barricades everywhere you looked and a camouflage netting covered maze in the centre, a role playing delight for all the kids (and us eager big kids). Mrs M had kindly filled my bag with face paint so quickly got the boys ready for their imminent scrap.

Seths taekwondo teacher had come up with an elaborate storyline and from just looking at his get up you could tell that he was really in to it. As he bellowed out commands us grown ups chuckled at he rear, the problem was us old timers at the back with our intermittent hearing had no idea what he was saying, so oblivious to any role playing that had been set we took the unclear directions and translated them in to something us dads could understand 'if its under 5 feet tall shoot at it'. The kids were darting about at crazy speed and for the first time I was really feeling my age. It seems that (although I had never seen them before) a couple of the kids had taken an instant disliking to me and were hell bent on unloading ALL of their ammo on me. (On the drive home Seth informed me that its because I have a villainous beard).

Everyone was having a whale of a time and I was most impressed by the 6 year old sniper that managed to shoot me in the jugular, quite the marksman. Seth and William were joined at the hip and whenever Seth managed to sneak up on me he managed to get me on the face which was closely followed by a second bullet from William. I seemed to spend most of my time picking up darts and reloading until a young lady called Emily started bringing me handfuls of ammo she had found, what a little angel. (sadly i didn't get a photo of her).

The final battle was understood by the grown ups clearly, as the children built one large barricade to hide behind us big kids were a pack of zombies coming to storm the trench. The children shot at us to try and fend us off and i lost both arms in the process but managed to get to the wall. As the zombies were tearing at the walls the children (especially the ones that had run out of ammo) were screaming excitably, it was a lot of fun.

It was two hours of mayhem and not eating since early that morning was taking its toll and i was getting very tired. So as everyone flattened the boxes for recycling we made a hasty get away (sorry guys). We definitely look forward to doing that again next time.

Thanks Excalibur and Happy Nerfday Reilly

Building on a larger educational scale with Triqo

A few days back there was a knock at the door from our VERY noisy postman, upon answering the door i got very excited at the outside of the box he was holding. I (i mean We) have been waiting for a delivery of new building material's to try out and this was it. If your a regular reader then you will know that we love building (with anything). When we first spotted Triqo I was really intrigued and Seth loved the idea of being able to make larger scale colourful buildings.

We had a brief play making small shapes so that we could get used to the pieces and the different ways we could attach them together but both me and Seth knew that we didn't what to waste our time making small things, this was a building material with pieces a lot larger than we are used to, we wanted to make something BIG!!!

Seth has come up with loads of ideas which i love, aiming high on the first build Seth wanted to build an arch for the doorway to his bedroom so we got to it sorting all the pieces in to colour order to make it easier for us. Seth struggled at first connecting the pieces but i have noticed that the more we have played with them the easier they connect, Seth's muscle condition doesn't help but he definitely found building with these more appealing than the smaller bricks that he is used to

It didn't take us long to make the arch, sadly there wasn't enough square pieces in this box but to be fair we did make it pretty big and there were loads of triangle pieces left in the box for us to make other things.

later in the afternoon we planned to visit Nanny and Grandad so we thought we would take our new toys to their house, The Triqo came out straight away and Seth informed me that next we would be making  a castle, Okay a castle that's doable, to be fair the pieces are so easy to stick together all you need is an imagination and the great colours and design mean everything you build looks great. We completed the castle in no time...

With plenty of time left to play we decided to make a parrot (for the 'pirates' of course) which I then wore on my shoulder while playing hide and seek, YAR!!

I've got a feeling that Triqo is going to be played with a lot, Seth is already talking about building things for the garden when the weather gets a little better. If I had lots more of this I would love to attempt a playhouse for the garden in the summer, the great thing about this is, its really doable and anyone could attempt a large build with this product with the greatest of ease, it was great to see Mrs M get involved too. 

I had some time to myself this morning so I had a play around with it. If you've got a good imagination and patience then there's no end to what you can achieve...

For a more in depth review of Triqo go to our review site blog: GiftsfromthePiratesReviews.

                                                                                   Until next time...