Lego Duplo Building Sets

Lego Duplo is a great way to start kids off with building blocks. When they don't put things in their mouths anymore go straight to regular legos!

My son, age 2, has two sets of Lego Duplo - both are piled together in this picture making it look like there are a lot more blocks than really come in each set:

Lego Duplo Building Fun - contains basic colored blocks with which you can build some animals including: a penguin, a polar bear, a duck, a giraffe and what ever else you want! They give you a sheet of animal eyes to stick on the blocks. They do give plenty of eyes, however, ours were gone in the first two days - I found eyes everywhere! This set was purchased at Toys R' Us for around $32. I have also seen these sets at Target, Walmart and of course Lego itself!

Pros - great for hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, fun for kids
Cons - the storage box they come in is very thin cardboard and doesn't hold up well. Get a plastic storage bin at Target or Walmart to store them in.

Lego Duplo Toy Story The Great Train Chase - contains three train cars (to assemble), Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Jessie, a saguaro cactus and other random blocks. This was also at Toys R' Us during the holidays but now I can only find it on Amazon for around $36.

Pros - characters and train cars have moving parts - fun for little ones, great starter set
Cons - characters look a little strange. My son said to me, "Mommy, why does Woody look weird?"

Playmobil Secret Agent Headquarters

I have to admit this is a pretty cool toy. There is a secret agent secret room that opens up. There is a transforming car/vehicle, a motion detector alarm, a trap door leading to a jail cell, and tons of accessories. The people have lots of weapons to hold in their hands, and modern features like laptops and dvds!

And, the best part, it is very compact. I expected a huge set up by the size of the box but I would say it is approx. 18 inches wide by 12 inches high!

This was purchased as a gift for my son. The price tag said $89.99. Expensive but seems to have already provided hours of play and fun. I'm not sure where the toy was purchased but I have seen it at Toys R' Us and Playmobil online - among others.

My only complaint about this was assembly. There were photo instructions without labeled pieces or bags. When I say bags I mean there were probably 12 different bags of pieces and when you started with step 1 you had to open several (4-5) bags to get the necessary pieces. Why not just have all the pieces for step 1 in the same bag?! That would be to simple huh?!

Anyway, we also had to look a lot at the box for pieces/parts that were not listed in the instructions at all. We figured it all out in the end but it did take me 2 1/2 hours to assemble. That was of course with my two boys needing to show me every piece. My advice would be to put it together when the kids are sleeping and it would go much faster!

*****For my boys, ages 2 and 5, this is not an age appropriate toy, however, they love it and play with it supervised on a daily basis. They have acquired many many toys that are not age appropriate. Some have worked out and some have not. If you have kids that still like to put things in their mouth I would recommend against this one. Some of the pieces are really really tiny. The box says for ages 7-12.*****

Pros - compact, interesting, provides hours of play and using imagination
Cons - assembly is lengthy, expensive

Lego Ninjago Spinners

My boys are crazy about Lego Ninjago. What isn't there to love? There are good guys, bad guys, ninjas, snakes, skeletons and weapons! The skeletons are a bit unattractive to look at, in my opinion, but I'm also not a boy. Who am I to judge?!

It all started with the iPad app Lego Ninjago Spinjitzu Scavenger Hunt. I installed the app and almost immediately deleted it. Seriously, all you do is spin around (by tapping on the screen) trying to break another character apart. Seemed pretty boring but the boys liked it so I left it on the iPad. Then we were shopping and randomly saw the skeleton spinners in a clearance bin. I got each of the boys one and they haven't stopped spinning them since. Every character in our lego collection has been in a Spinjitzu battle at one time or another. We have Kruncha and Wyplash - both skeletons but with a birthday fast approaching I'm sure we will be seeing some more spinners in the house!

Oh yeah, the app does get better. It's called a scavenger hunt for a reason. You can scan barcodes off of lego boxes to unlock new characters to fight and earn coins. You don't have to buy the legos, you just need to scan the code or type in the number. We tried scanning codes at Toys R' Us because they seem to have a good selection of Lego Ninjago sets but they didn't have the ones we needed. Then we found them online and it made things much easier. In all, it's a fun app.

Did I forget to mention there's a Lego Ninjago cartoon on Cartoon Network that elevates the desire to collect unnatural amounts of ninjago 'stuff'? Yep, why not have it all!

Pros - Boys love playing with them, spinners have fallen on tile floors repeatedly without breaking
Cons - Skeleton hands have already broken from changing weapons so often, characters don't stay in spinners when you try to spin them 'extra fast' - as my son puts it