We have our local fair and expo this week, so in celebration of the carnival festivities I built this ferris wheel. The wheel does spin, the baskets remain upright, and the doors open and close. Jeremiah and I had some fun giving different lego people and animals rides. I also made carnival swings- check them out on my March 8th posting
Jeremiah built this train engine all by himself. I'm pretty impressed! And check it out. The train station is still standing, at least in this photo. The station actually met a messy demise a few days ago. It definitely holds the record for having survived the longest out of all the lego creations at my house.
Here's a detail looking into the fire response team room of the fire truck. There are buckets of tools (walkie-talkies, hammers, brooms, axes, and such) that you can just barely see peaking out of the left-hand corner of this photo. Jeremiah helped me find the tools, fire fighters, and hats. He particularly liked using red pants.
This truck has lots of little compartments for the fire fighters to store all their gear. I didn't put anything in the compartments, though. I figured I would let Jeremiah take care of that, and he did! He loves all the cubby-holes so much, he could barely leave the truck alone long enough to let me photograph it. The back of the truck would be where the water tank would be, but I left it open for more storage.
The dune buggy: I think maybe David helped a little in building this one.
Jeremiah tells me that this is "A kitty license plate car: You take some kitty license plates out and you put them on the kitties."
This one is "A three-wheeled fire truck: It fights fires. Some fire trucks have no nozzles at all."
"Did you see that? Dingo Dog has knocked down almost all the parking meters. What a terrible driver!" -Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.
This is my effort at making Dingo Dog, Richard Scarry's terrible driver, out of legos. I haven't really made many lego figures before, especially not dogs, so this was fun. The car was tricky, because it is so round in the illustrations. And in my usual style, the doors open and close.
Our family took a spring break trip to Tahoe, one of Jeremiah's first trips to the snow. This gondola is inspired from that trip. The biggest challenge in making this was to construct towers strong enough to hold the gondola, and balancing the cart properly.
Jeremiah and I watched "Dirty Jobs" a while back. The guy was cleaning out the nastiest toilet I have ever seen. Jeremiah asked me to build a toilet for him, so I built this. The handle is weighted so the it returns to a horizontal position after being flushed.
This DNA is for you, David! (David's a fan of molecular biology.)
Jeremiah's first word was "bus", one of the earlier signs of his deep and abiding love of all things with wheels and motors. This fairly simple bus has a bike rack in front, in case a passenger wants to take her bike with her.
This picture shows the driver and the little machine that accepts payment. Though I've spent a fair amount of time on buses, I don't know the current cost of taking the bus. I am fairly certain our local buses do not accept Aztec gold, however.
While on the bus, I enjoy seeing all the different people who are also riding.
This bus is carrying construction workers, soccer players, a professor, a king, young people, old people, and a rather dark lady wearing a black cloak.
This playground is partly inspired by current playgrounds, but includes a merry-go-round (the red thing) that really spins around. The blue and yellow thing is a balance beam, the black and silver thing in the front is a little slide. The swings really swing, and the baby swing has a safety bar that opens and closes.
I like this passenger car, complete with passengers. It's a lot like the first one I built, except with real train wheels and runs on lego train tracks, and stuff. It has a different color pattern, too. The little train station in the corner has survived and amazingly long time for a lego creation at our house.
Here's the inside. There's a spot for luggage, too.
I built this little helicopter (at the top) with pieces left over after building the helicopter in the bottom picture. It's kind of an after thought, but I like it.
Until Jeremiah asked me to build one for him, I never really knew how helicopters worked. According to our old encyclopedia, the helicopter changes direction by changing the pitch of the blades. This fantabulous little bubble helicopter does just that enabling it to move forward, backward, left, or right. Well, in theory, anyhow. I can't remember exactly why there is a lego string on the back. I think that Jeremiah was using this one as a rescue helicopter. He saw some of the rescue scenes from "the Guardian"
Jeremiah built these two trucks. I especially like the tow truck.
I built this truck after Jeremiah asked me to tell him a story about a delivery truck. In the story, the truck had a special cabinet for little packages. In the lego truck, the old-school window is the cabinet. Jeremiah enjoyed driving the truck around, filling it with little packages, and delivering them throughout the house.
Every now and again, David, Jeremiah and I go bowling. I love to bowl, but I always need bumpers. Jeremiah is pretty good (he bowls more strikes than I do), even though he's still too little to bowl a whole game. After the last time we went bowling, Jeremiah wanted to build a bowling alley, so we did. He and I built the lanes, complete with gutters (no bumpers, though!). David built the thingy that sweeps away all the pins you've missed before setting up the lane for the next turn. It really swings back and forth and sweeps away the pins. We used legos soccer balls or marbles for the bowling balls.
