Watch Your Step

This is NOT a Stepped in Dog Poop story. It's a lego story. (Although in either case you definitely want to watch your step.)

If Legos could talk, the hundreds of them, scattered about the house, could tell a story of how they got under the coffee table, in the bathroom drawer, on the front porch, in the carseat, etc., etc. I don't want to stop and listen to any of these stories. I just want to vacuum them up. But I don't. I bend my Puzzle Back over and pick up the Lego City on a Cliff called the tub ledge, lego spies hiding in the plant, the lightsaber tucked in the lamp like a motion detector, microchips on the stairs (just to test me), tiny legos imbedded in the rug, in the dog's crate, and on every floor of every room in the house. Not a lot of them, like a big noticeable pile that you walk around, but a couple here and there -- the way bees spread out in clover so you have to watch your barefoot steps, lest you let your guard down on the way to the toilet at night and you..OWWW! Then you don't mind that clanking sound as they reverse-tornado up the vacuum's hose. That's the sound of an accident averted. Music to my feet.

Back when I was trying to be the perfect mother, which dates back to when we only had a few hundred legos, rather than a few hundred thousand, I would avoid sucking up a lego with the vaccum at all costs because back then, if I did hear that clanking sound in the vacuum's hose, dare I admit, I would actually STOP EVERYTHING. You ready for this? I'd open up the vacuum, pull out the bag and...yes, I really did it. I fished my fingers all around that gross grimey dust mite mardi gras until I plucked out the teeny tiny headlight or taillight lego that slipped through inadvertently. It's sort of like drinking so much beer that you puke. You only need to do it once and you never let yourself get that carried away again.

The story of the chewed up Legos needs no telling. "Maggie, no legos!!" The ones on the rug in front of the toilet....Only one person does that. I suspect at some stage in male development, in that gray area when boys become men, they switch over to a newspaper or a magazine but I wouldn't be surprised if the reason he one day in the future creates a job he can do from home is so that he can always have his legos when he has to poop.

He'll find a way to work that in....the way legos always find their way under the couch cushions.