Our little puzzle master

As a kid, we never had Lego to play with.

Not sure if it just wasn't popular enough or if they hadn't figured out that by making pop culture translate into Legos, you can sell a hell of a lot or if it was just the fact that Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs and other building kits were just more popular at the time.  It was the 70's so go figure.

And since we waited until later in life to have our son (he's 5 now) maybe we just didn't see the rise of Legos to the crazed frenzy that they now occupy in the lives of kids these days.

But our son is now a die-hard Lego builder and has more fun sorting through hundreds of pieces to build characters from his favorite shows or movies than I ever thought he could.

Now admittedly, from a very early age, he was enamored with puzzles.  He would do them, break them up and then do them again.  He started out with the very simple Melissa & Doug ones or just any good old 12-24 piece puzzle, but he would bang through them so quickly that we found it problematic trying to keep challenging him.  Before we knew it, he was up to 100 piece puzzles and knocking them out in less than an hour.

So it really shouldn't come as a surprise that he's attacked these 3-D puzzles so voraciously.  As of late he has been taking on the 120-150 piece Lego sets all on his own, and working with Daddy or Mommy for anything larger.

Until this past Sunday.  As Mommy got caught up with work from her normal gig and Daddy vegetated out watching some playoff football, little man took on his 452 piece Lego Ninjago Samurai X Mech and completed it in about 2 1/2 hours.

Here's a shot of our little wunderkind and his completed Lego set.

He and I have been working on Jabba's Palace (from Star Wars) which is 717 pieces.  But I will admit that for the most part, I just take care of finding the pieces for the next step for him and have only put on about 30 pieces on the set.  We're about 70% done.

Future in Engineering for him?  Who knows but the skills required are mostly critical thinking, ability to visualize and of course, following directions which could lead him in any direction.  Whatever direction he decides is going to be a real hoot to watch though.