Max-lympics of the Birthdapiad in Legos

With the Olympics taking place this week, it reminded me about an event we had with Max and some friends a few months ago.

You know, Max is getting old.  Too old.  To celebrate the completion of yet another year of life, we held a festivity of ancient origin, dating back, in our family, at least a decade--give or take 10 years.  Yes, I'm talking about the renowned...birthday party with games.  And, given Max's penchant for all things Lego-related, we concluded that a Lego-themed party was not only appropriate, but also our moral parental obligation. 

After carefully reviewing the rules and regulations of each of the 400 events in the 33 Olympic sports in detail, we selected the 3 most strenuous, challenging, and age-appropriate for our visitors:

• Lego-relay
• Lego-car construction and racing
• Pankration

We start in the backyard by placing 2 large buckets or bowls on opposite ends of the yard.  The first was filled with Duplo blocks.  The second was empty.  We did the most Olympic thing we could to determine teams and counted off "one" and "two" until every kid had a team.  

Next, each team came up a with a name.  I can't remember the names they came up with, but it was something like the "Donut Heads" and "The Communists".  Probably.

After all that hard work, we started the event.  I begin by posing as that famous statue pointing the way west (as shown in the photo below).

Then, we said "Ready?  Set?  Go!" and the boys ran back and forth, filling the bucket on the other side of the yard with the Duplo blocks, one by one.  One of the teams won.  Probably.

We tried to play this game for as long as we could, until the sun went down and we were as sweaty as possible.

At that point, it was time for the second event: dumping a huge bag of Lego car parts out on the kitchen table and telling each of the boys to use their creativity to create a Lego car of their own (which they could keep) to be used in racing.

Our little Olympians thought that was awesome.  And surprisingly, there were zero fights (not even being sarcastic) and everyone wanted to show us their finished product!

(I took advantage of this time to sit under an overhead light to determine how much of my scalp you could see with light directly shining on my part.)

After constructing our Lego cars, we set up a ramp in the TV room and raced the cars down to the bottom--first in an orderly fashion to see which car was the fastest, and then in a disorderly, chaotic and random fashion to see how many wipeouts and epic wrecks we could create.

At the conclusion of the previous two events, we decided that we were all winners.

Next up was pankration, but just as we were about to begin, it was time for the kids to go home.  Well, there's always next year...