vacation Tuesday (June 9) part 2: LEGO house

The last area we wanted to get to early was the emotion area.  (We should have also prioritized racing, but at this point it was getting busy everywhere.)  Here you build a creature, give it an emotion, and have it scanned in the machine.  Then it dances in its emotion for a minute and the previous creature comes out to dance too.  Your emotion gets passed on to the previous creature.  This worked really well and Joshua especially loved making the creatures, but it took a bit to get the creature scanned.  I'm sure there is a bunch of processing it needs to do to make it dance, but that part was "the worst" part of the area.

After making several, I realized there was a flower making spot right next to it.  I like flowers, so I went here.  The weirdest part was they had several pieces with a bar on them, but no pieces with a clip to clip onto the bar.  It was awkward until I realized this, and then I just worked with the limitation.  I made a lot of flowers.  It wasn't my favorite area, but it was up there.

We took a brief break and then found ourselves in the red zone.  Yesterday this is where we made the ducks.  Today we decided to make penguins!  We would make one penguin at each station and would have ten minutes per penguin.  Surprisingly, we stuck to the ten minutes pretty well.  When we do this at home it is often, "ten more minutes!"  The results were pretty fun.  They all are obviously penguins, but some are definitely better and worse than others.  

Yellow bricks, from left to right, Joshua, Isaac, Amanda, Ben

All color bricks, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac.  (The yellow ones match the people, but they were moved since the previous picture.)

All colors and shapes, from left to right: Ben, Amanda, Joshua, Isaac.  I think Isaac ended up mostly doing another brick penguin, although he was using the all shapes area.  I think Joshua won with the most recognizable (probably for all three), but he even had time to make an iceberg for the last one and that added a lot of context. 

Although my last penguin wasn't the best, I really did like its stomach.

Although no one was super excited about it, we took pictures in the Duplo pool.  When will the next time we find this many Duplo?  However, it is super uncomfortable to get in and out.

It wasn't quite lunch time, so we all went on a tour of the outside of the building.  By this time we had seen several other members of yesterday's tour, which was a ton of fun.  It's really fun making connections with people when you don't really need to worry about seeing them long term.  (To be fair, it's often fun to see them long term too, but there's not as much pressure if it is just a short interaction.) It wasn't raining this time, so we were able to enjoy the mini-playgrounds a bit more.

We went up the yellow side.

Then we got some pictures at the top.

It was surprisingly bright for having so many clouds.  The kids were told to close their eyes and smile.

And then down the blue side!  There were several playground areas not shown, either because I just didn't get pictures or they were a little bit too busy.

I really like this action shot.

Well, I guess this day will have a part 3, if not a part 4!  We just made it to lunch time!