Review: LEGO® Awesome Ideas Book

When I was little I spent hours and hours with my LEGO box building multi-coloured house after multi-coloured house.  The base was a thick green rectangle (what's happened to them now?) and then I built up the walls with any and every colour I had with some windows nice and evenly dotted around then another green block on top.  We didn't have a 'set' that I can remember so had to be creative.

  

Not like now, the boys have tons of sets, fire stations, police stations, train stations, numerous vehicles and a proper house, not to mention a harbour and Hulks Hellicarrier.

Sadly as the models get broken up (as they do with a 7 and 4 year old) they don't always get rebuilt, as this happens all our pieces go into storage drawers.

  

Then we moved house and decided that would be a perfect sort out opportunity, well we got part way, we started to bag up the sets but only managed a few.

Now the instructions are all boxed away as we are re-decorating the boys rooms and (after climbing over boxes) I was able to bring their LEGO downstairs to play with, but they were lost.  You see that's the problem with buying sets now, my boys don't have the experience of building for the fun of building.  Which was why it was perfect timing for the DK LEGO® Awesome Ideas* book to land on our doorstep.

Book Review: The Maloney's Magical Weatherbox.

Where you one of those kids who liked to write short stories?  So was Nigel Quinlan, as a teenager he used to mind his parents' petrol pumps, one day he decided to write a short story about ..... a phone box.  But not any old phonebox  - the one halfway down his street, next to the Post Office in his little village of Murroe in the Irish south-west.   As he grew up he worked in libraries and bookshops but his love of writing never went away, creating stories for local festivals and acts with the local drama group.   But his short story idea never went away and has now become his first novel The Maloney's Magical Weatherbox.