Sorting, the Lego Room and My Left Knee

Elliptical Time: 5 minutes --took a while for my knee to make it around
Bike Time: 40 minutes 

There are lots of things that I used to be able to do before my skiing accident and knee injury that I am still working my way up to doing. Today, I hit a new milestone.

The Boy has a lego room. It isn't very big--it is part of a converted attic space next to the Boy's bedroom, which is also converted attic space. This is what the lego room looked like this morning:

Before

As you can see--or as you cannot see, there is a carpet under my son's 40,000 lego piece collection. I bought this rug before the Boy was born. It was a rug I had coveted from Pottery Barn kids for ages, and I finally bought it when it went on clearance. The floor in the room in St. Louis was awful, so I covered it with this rug.

Rug in the Boy's room in St. Louis

I don't mind clutter and mess. I would photograph my desk as Exhibit A for disorganization, but I don't want to. 

I do, however, mind wool moths. These are little moths that eat wool. I hate them.

Two horrible moths that are laying eggs in this rug. These moths are now dead.

These tiny bugs and their larva have made big holes in this rug. The best way to get rid of the bugs it to vacuum the rug, but the Legos first need to be cleaned up.

These are the moth holes.

The Boy got his first Lego set when he was four. By time he was five, he had several Lego sets. He is a builder and a rebuilder. Very few sets stay completed as designed. They get taken apart, re-organized and rebuilt in to a million other things. I am happy to support my son's Lego habit. Since he spent so much time in his Lego room, the way for me to spend time with him was to go to the Lego room. I am not much of a builder, so I became a sorter. I sorted his Legos by type, and put them in bins. Some of the bins were from an old Target toy shelf from Claire Adele's room. Others I bought at fancy organizing stores. He has a fishing tackle box to store tiny, one of a kind pieces. I also re-use plastic rice and ice cream containers for Legos.

Ice cream containers. I mostly bought the ice cream because I thought the packaging would be good for storing Legos. Seriously.

Sorting Legos became my hobby. It is a mindful/mindless activity like knitting or needlepoint, except I don't get a nice sweater or pillow at the end. Sorting Legos is more Sisyphean -- once you are done, the Legos get unsorted again and it starts all over, like knitting a sweater that becomes slowly unraveled while you work so you are never done. But the goal isn't to be "done." It is to make this massive collection accessible. We have downloaded instructions from sets he doesn't have and built them. He had books on building. And of course, he makes his own creations.

Yet, it was peaceful and cathartic to sort piles of Legos and have them easy to find. My sorting isn't beautiful, but it is calming. After I lost the School Board election, I was in the room sorting Legos. It was December, the week before my skiing accident. The sorting was not as relaxing as it usually was. Before, it was a productive mental escape. I could take a mental vacation and still accomplish something, even if it was small. Now, I don't have a pile of stressful work in front of me that I need to take a break from. Why was I sorting Legos now? Was this what my life was to become? Instead of making me feel better, I felt depressed.

I didn't know that was the last time I would sort Legos for months. While it might not seem so, sorting Legos is like a pilates/yoga class. There is lots of small movements that require bending, squatting, stretching, sitting crossed legged, and sitting and crawling on my knees. I really need that 150 degrees of flexion. I need to sit on the ground, stand up, move and get back on the floor continuously.And this floor is covered with sharp, plastic Legos, so I need to be careful about where and how I move. There is twisting and pivoting. I wasn't able to any of those activities since my accident. I had tried for about three minutes a few weeks ago, and it was a fail.

Today I went upstairs to check on something, and I noticed the moths. I thought it was time to give it a shot, to see if my knee were up to sorting. I put my shoes on for the task. Arguably, the only thing worse than stepping on a Lego in bare feet is stepping in dog poop, althought dog poop generally doesn't draw blood. My ability to maneuver in a small space around small things isn't where it used to be. I didn't want to trip or twist my leg if I stepped on something accidentally. Even wearing shoes, I almost lost my balance once when I didn't step in the right place.

I survived. I had the Boy come and help with this, as it is his Lego room. I don't think it is fair to saddle him with my anal-retentive sorting scheme, but it was nice to get his assistance with simple work. He didn't have to sort a pile of a thousand pieces into studs, cheese wedges and 2x2 talls. The goal was to vacuum to kill the moths, and at some point I skip the sorting and scoop the leftover pieces into bins so I can drive my Dyson around the room. The Boy was the scooper today.

Tub of mini-figure heads. They look like garbanzo beans.

I didn't put "Cleaning the Lego Room" on my list of activities that I wanted to do after my surgery, but it is a milestone. I wasn't as flexible as I wanted to be, but I made enough progress. 

After