Saturday with Red 5

Despite having a new game to play, in addition to the old reliables, I spent very little of my free time on Saturday on the computer.

My wife was off at a trade show and my daughter and I were on our own.

The weather was nice and the Simpsons were in the theater, but my daughter has a summer cold, so we stayed home.  We couldn’t have any real friends over, so we found some plastic ones instead.

We played with LEGO most of Saturday.

We kicked off the day by opening up my new LEGO set, the X-Wing Fighter (kit 6212).

In fact, my daughter was so excited about this kit that I had to open it up and start assembly at the kitchen table while I was eating breakfast.

First things first of course.  We had to get out the mini figures so she could play with those while I worked on assembling the X-Wing.  This kit comes with Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, Wedge Antilles, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca.

Here they are in and around the assembled X-Wing.

Assembling the X-Wing was not too difficult.  It did take a while, but the instructions were pretty well laid out, even for LEGO instructions.  Unlike the instructions in some of the other sets, the X-Wing instructions showed which pieces were used with each step and was pretty good at showing where they went.  Some other sets, like The Krusty Krab kit, make you play “guess what changed” on nearly every page.

This may have been the most intricate LEGO model I have ever assembled.  There is a worm-gear mechanism inside the hull of the ship that is driven by a knob on the back which moves the wings of the fighter so that you can have the wings in the “X” attack position, or in the cruise/landing position.  It reminds me very much of an F-14 Tomcat model I made when I was a kid.

Here is the fully assembled X-Wing.  Catwoman is lurking in the background, no doubt planning to steal this technological marvel.

LEGO X-Wing and Crew

Of course, getting the X-Wing assembled lead to a day of LEGO play and repair.  Unfortunately, the X-Wing is a bit fragile, like so many intricate LEGO models, so I spent some of the day re-attaching engines, landing gear, and cockpit accomidations.   Still, in the hands of a five year old, it held up pretty well.

Generation Gap Warning: My daughter kept referring to Princess Leia as Queen Amidala, Padme being more well known to her that Leia.

And this day of LEGO play culminated in my daughter and I watching “Star Wars: Episode IV,” during which we acted out as many of the scenes as we could with the mini figures and the X-Wing.

It was a fun day.

And at the end of the day, after the movie and when she was getting ready for bed, my daughter announced that we really had to get more Star Wars LEGO kits because we did not have enough characters or props to act out all of the scenes in the movie.

My wife groaned.

I grinned.

I will have to see what they have up on eBay.  I am not going to buy that LEGO Death Star or the new Millenium Falcon kit, but a couple of the smaller kits would be fine.

So the X-Wing has joined the rest of our LEGO kits, which includes three of the SpongeBob SquarePants kits and the one of the Avatar kits.  My daughter seems to be primed for LEGO Universe when it shows up.