I cannot tell the origin story of LEGO City without first admitting that my husband was right.

Allow me to set the stage. The year is 2020. Five of us remain trapped at home: two working parents, two young children attending Zoom school, one toddler emptying the Tupperware drawers on repeat, and not enough noise-canceling headphones in the world to drown out the sound of everyone chewing.

Right around the time the walls start closing in and my patience begins hovering around a negative seventeen at all times, my husband and I decide to move all of the LEGO sets into the garage. Our house is very old and very small, and the garage follows suit. Built in 1950, our one-car garage is hardly big enough to store a car, let alone anything else. It’s been functioning as a glorified storage unit ever since we moved in. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and we are desperate for a lot of things, including but not limited to: getting toys off the floor, finding breathing room from each other, and having another “place” for the kids to go.

That same week, in a moment of serendipity, someone offers up a free wooden coffee table in a local Facebook group. I can hardly believe my good fortune. I’m not exactly crafty, but how hard can it be to DIY a LEGO table? I bring it home beaming as if I am holding a live puppy and not someone else’s unwanted furniture. Look what I found! I am such an amazing, resourceful mom!

Shortly thereafter, a marital argument occurs. The exact details of the squabble are not important, but what I can tell you is that my husband and I spend the day in separate quarters, huffing and puffing on opposite ends of the house. Eventually Brett retreats outside, claiming the backyard territory for himself, while I stay inside, planting my flag in the bedroom. At some point I hear power tools, but I don’t bother investigating because how my husband spends his free time when we are fighting is not my concern.

That is, until my children appear in the kitchen and inform me Daddy is “building” a LEGO table.

My eyebrows shoot up. Say what?⁠ The reasonably-sized free table I picked up is still sitting in the garage, untouched. Meanwhile, Brett has gone rogue, totally off script. He’s in the backyard building a new table from scratch using scrap wood from a leftover house project. An hour later, he presents the boys with a finished LEGO table that is approximately the size of a boat.⁠

Naturally, I throw a fit. WHERE is that going to live? WHY is it so large? Did you make this just to spite me because we are fighting?!⁠

He responds calmly, “It’s been a rough year. Let the kids have this.”⁠

Smoke is practically coming out of my ears. This mammoth of a table is three times bigger than anything I had imagined. My tantrum continues. It’s gargantuan! It’s ridiculous! It’s going to take up half the garage!

Brett, unfazed, simply turns his eyes toward our boys, who are already fawning over their new LEGO table as if it’s a pet we’ve just told them they can keep.

I finally surrender with a long, exasperated sigh, clearly outnumbered.

Lo and behold, every LEGO set exits stage left and the boys begin playing in the garage for multiple consecutive hours a day. Together, they build a world of their own with nothing but plastic bricks and their precious imaginations. They even take their chips out with them—a bonus gift!—so I no longer have to listen to them chew. They put down LEGO roads, green plates for “grass” and blue plates for “lakes” as a foundation to what they affectionately name LEGO City.

Inside the house, we gain instant peace and quiet, nary a LEGO brick in sight. And out there—in our cramped, dirty, one-car garage—in the midst of a pandemic raging all around us, our two young boys gain a little universe where they can escape it all.

Seemingly overnight, that stupid gigantic table becomes an oasis for our entire family, a constant source of joy and delight for my children.⁠

Obviously, we had to keep it.

***

In third grade, Everett was assigned a report on the inventor of his choosing. None of us were surprised when he chose Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO. Originally a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, Kirk began making wooden toys in 1932. Three years later, he held a competition to name his company and ended up picking his own idea: LEGO. The name is an abbreviation of two Danish words “leg godt”—a phrase that means, “play well.”

Like most kids, my boys’ obsessions change with the seasons. One day they’re enamored with Pokemon and Minecraft; the next they’re captivated by origami and laser tag. We’ve walked through the Harry Potter Era, The Star Wars Era, The Dude Perfect Era. Their passions du jour may shift with the wind, but where some toys and interests eventually lose their zeal, LEGO has had significant staying power.

For most of my motherhood, our home has been littered with tiny plastic bricks, raw material constructed into mansions and cars and stadiums filled with mini figurines. My boys might take a break for a few weeks now and then, but they always find their way back to this little universe.

Dream, plan, build, repeat.

***

In 2023, we finally hit “garage glow-up” on the neverending list of fixer-upper projects. Brett paints the walls, installs storage cabinets, has the floors epoxied, and even hangs a TV with hopes of converting part of the garage into a home gym.

Even though I can see the writing on the wall, the day Brett tells me he is ready to get rid of the LEGO table, I gasp in horror.

Seemingly overnight, we’ve pulled a Freaky Friday. Brett now wants space in the garage while—plot twist!—I am practically throwing my body across this stupid gigantic table in order to save it.

If I were sitting in therapy right now, this is the part of the session where we’d dive into “the thing underneath the thing.” This isn’t about the table. It’s not about the LEGO brand at all. This is about my children barreling toward adolescence and my desperate desire to preserve their childhood. This is about a world saturated in technology and my desperate desire to hold onto something analog.

Over the course of just a few years, what began as a parenting hack during the pandemic has morphed into something else entirely. Today, LEGO City is a tangible representation of everything my mother-artist heart values: the ability for my children to dream, plan, build, and get lost in hours and hours of embodied play set inside a universe constructed from their own imaginations.

In 2020, Everett was eight years old. He’s now in middle school, where the majority of kids have smartphones and have already learned to cure any hint of boredom online. Today, sacrificing half our garage to preserve the art of tangible play doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all.

Or, perhaps I should say: It’s a sacrifice I am more than willing to make.

I stand my ground while the kids offer Brett their best puppy dog eyes. Only this time, he is the one outnumbered. The table stays.

Recommitted, the boys tear LEGO City down to the studs and rebuild it from the ground up. They plot and plan, architecting skyscrapers and coffee shops and a dozen other buildings for their impressive plastic town.

LEGO City comes roaring back to life and has been a thriving metropolis ever since.

***

A few weeks ago, on a Tuesday night close to ten o’clock, I head to the garage to tell my boys to brush their teeth. I crack the door open and survey the scene in front of me as a wave of—what is it?—joy, relief, astonishment, or perhaps just plain old love, washes over me.

My two boys are hunched over opposite sides of LEGO City making stop motion movies. Everett’s directing an elaborate car crash scene, in which a few vehicles collide and then spin out onto the LEGO streets. Meanwhile, Carson’s directing a Spongebob Squarepants musical. I can’t help but admire the variety of cinema being produced here: one comedy, one drama—all on the same film set.

I stand in the doorway smiling like a cheesy mom in a cereal commercial, silently admiring the creativity unfolding before my eyes. For a split second, I contemplate letting them stay up later, even though it’s past their bedtime. I tiptoe back to the kitchen to grab my phone—click—snapping a photo that is anything but Instagram-worthy. Even though our garage is in slightly better shape at this point, the LEGO table is still surrounded by tools, spiderwebs, a treadmill, impending Goodwill donations and half-empty cans of paint.

The boys don’t seem to mind, though. This small, cluttered garage is a perfectly fine backdrop to the magical world they’ve created for themselves.

I am reminded yet again what I am fighting to preserve. This isn’t about the LEGO sets, or the janky table my husband cobbled together, or the mess strewn across our garage. This is about fighting for the wonder, creativity, and imagination of my children.

LEGO City is a bubble that will pop at some point. I know this; I am not naive. Try as I might, I cannot freeze time. The teen years are coming, along with issues and problems that will not be solved by tiny plastic bricks.

But until then, I’ll be here, fighting to preserve this space the way others fight to preserve the rainforest. I’ll be here, like the most unexpected bodyguard, defending this stupid gigantic table with my life.

I’ll be here, protecting this little universe—the place where my children do, indeed, play well—for as long as they want it to exist.

Ashlee is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she's not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold. You can also keep up with her work at Substack.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.

Blog