A Lego Note

Yesterday in the car The Child was telling me he had read that if you have 16 Lego bricks, each of them a little square with four studs on the top, there are enough combinations to keep you busy for a lifetime. So I’m not surprised by the infinite variety of things he comes up with given his three full drawers of pieces and parts collected over the past decade. In fact, this weekend he built a Lego museum, complete with exhibits on zoology, the wild west, life on Mars, an armory, a pirate ship, and a gift shop.

Yesterday he was puttering around with his toys…actually, he was stalling because I had asked him to clean up his room before going on a mission to seek pizza…and he brought out a small pink and yellow helicopter to show me. “What do you think, Dad?” he asked. “I call it the Chopper of Doom.”

I looked at the model, which was indeed a very convincing helicopter. He had, however, constructed it from pink and yellow bricks that I think came to us as some kind of Happy Meal toy. The sloped brick that represented the front window of the cockpit had an imprinted picture of a female being with blond pigtails, yellow flesh, and a bill.

“Son, you can’t call it a Chopper of Death. It’s pink and has a girl duck for a pilot.”

“What can I call it, then?” he asked, whipping it up and down in a flight path designed to poke out an eye.

I thought for a moment. This is a formative stage in his life, and I don’t want to say anything negative about the female end of our species. I want him to inculcate a sense of respect towards women, as well as a secure sense of his own gender identity. So I settled on something that I thought was pretty clever.

“You can call it the Chopper of Feminine Quack.”

He liked this a lot, and soon we came up with a theme song for the inevitable television show that will result when news of his creation spreads to the coast:

It’s the Chopper of Feminine Quack!
It’s the Chopper of Feminine Quack!
It’s pink and it’s yellow and it’s flown by a duck.
It’s the Chopper of Feminine Quack!

Because this is Lego, however, the chopper soon became boring. Which is why, within minutes, there was also the Killer Robot of Feminine Quack, the Airplane of Feminine Quack, the Speedboat of Feminine Quack, the Other Slightly Different Helicopter of Feminine Quack, The Seaplane of Feminine Quack, and the Guided Missile of Feminine Quack.

Thank the Lord there were only 9 pieces in his model, or this could go on forever.