How many Lego pieces can you handle?

The Lego Mania starts something like this: You stumble over a Lego box the size of a small car in your living room two weeks after Christmas.

1,490 pieces of complicated machinery.
Oh, and some Legos.

“Are you ever going to start this?” you screech.

This is your first mistake. Prepare for dinner on your lap because the kit will now be “in progress” on the dining room table for the next week. You will soon see how unappetizing a kit of 1,490 pieces truly is.

You’ll be tempted to get it over all at once, to rip it off like a Band-Aid. Careful now. If you kick-start the Lego project, you become Project Manager. The kids will expect you to lead the initiative on Bags 1, 2 and 3. Keep your distance. Better to threaten to return it than threaten to start it.

One night the wind will change. And the kids will insist they want to do it. All of it. Tonight. At 7pm on a Saturday. A little thrill will roll through you. Let’s blow the doors off, you think. What a cool memory, the night you stayed up until midnight doing that magnificent Christmas Village with three Lego trees, a chandelier and a plastic cat walking the railing of the upstairs bedroom.

You haven’t felt this young in years. You dump the contents on the table because you can’t help yourself. You elbow one child in the face to keep him from opening Bag 2. But they insist. He is looking for the gold: 8 pairs of legs.

By 7:15pm: The figurines are all built. And you’ve got so many damn pieces of plastic on offer that you’ll never notice the one that slid under the fridge until page 46.

The new Lego people are off on a merry adventure with the children. In other parts of the house, in formerly glorious Lego sets brought to life in past Christmases.

“Come help me!” you scream. But you don’t look up. You can’t. You are this close to finding that black piece with a hook, two studs and one hole.

You stay on the worksite alone. You’re ok with this at first. It gives you a little time to get organized, review the booklet, determine your attack. Also, it looks like the first dozen pages you can whip off and save about an hour of agony, if only they’ll stay gone for a few minutes.

You complete the sled, the cart, the outhouse, two wreaths and a lamppost. About the time you attempt the multi-layered roof on the back half of the house, they’ll want in.

“Um, it’s complicated,” you’ll say. “Let me just…”

“It’s mine, Mom!”

Here, they’ll wrench a white slate plastic roof from your hands, one of your finest creations of 2013. For a moment your hands tighten, then you let go.

“Fine,” you say, anyway, your neck is shaped like a 2-stud by 3-stud L-shaped Lego needed for the window overhang.

But you don’t get to the kitchen sink before they need you.

“Mom, help me!”

So it begins. You’ll never finish tonight. But it will be OK. It will be a week’s worth of time with your head bent near theirs. A time for discussing which shade of grey the book actually means. Time for marveling over who expected an 8-year-old to follow this as the 38-year-old is having some trouble. Time for you to convince the kids that an improv chimney with one yellow piece is better than moving the fridge.

In the end, you’ll have a compact 1,490-piece village that they’ll play with for precisely three days before abandoning altogether.

But you’ll have spent a week side-by-side, happy, united with a common goal. At some point, your husband will make you promise never to buy another Lego set again. At another point, you will promise. Later still, you’ll buy another set and do it all over again.

New Year's Resolution: Starting over & your diet

It's no small feat to start over. But we've all done it a million times. For example, we've all started our diet over a million times. Starting over is a beautiful, exciting thing. You can taste it, feel it, envision it. You imagine the victory at hand. The anticipation and daydreaming is as good as anything else.

The run-up
You start thinking about all the mini Milky Ways you've eaten in your lifetime. 5,000 easy. You start thinking, who needs them? They make you thick, slow and drowsy. What's the sense? Every time you eat one, you think about how it's your last one. Right after the next one.

The disgust
Pretty soon you can hardly enjoy a Milky Way. The more you think about them, as you eat them, the more you love to hate them.

To prove how "done" you are with them, you eat the whole bag in one sitting. You are sick for the next 12 hours. When your honey asks you what the problem is, you are evasive.

"Did you eat something different today?"

"No," you say. And it's not even a lie.

The kitchen clean-out
You go through the house next and eat anything with sugar in it. You think about throwing it out, but what a waste of food. You think about giving it to your kids, but why would you knowingly poison them? Better to take a hit for the team.
Every cupboard is bare, only fruit remains, bruised, in your path.

The after-effect
You make it through the sick streak. That's it, you vow, never again. You've pushed your limits on the sweets and proven their dire effects. You eat a Twix while you think this. The more Twixes you eat, the greater your resolve that you can live without the Milky Ways.

The grocery store resolve
You literally dance your way through Tom's. You will not go down the baking aisle. You will not stop at the candy aisle. You won't so much as look at the cold wall of pop (liquid sugar, another favorite). No, you're the queen of grocery store resolve, bypassing all the evil and buying more fruit in a day than you have in a month.

The breakdown
You are shocked and dismayed to find out the corner gas station does not keep hours past 10 p.m. You would have gone earlier but there were key family members around who'd borne witness to the kitchen clean-out.

You start rifling through the house. Cripes, there has to be something sweet here somewhere. It's been two days. You haven't lost a pound, have only wasted money on fruit, organic no less, and you just considered looking in the kids' backpacks for food.

Wait. You've found it. A half opened bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard above the microwave. Expiration 2009. You must have missed this (consciously) during the clean-out, their value much less prominent in the face of a chocolate-caramel-nougat combination. Until now. Now just a morsel of chocolate will do, and do well.

Tomorrow, of course, you will start over.

Here's to a year of starting over, doing better, laughing more, trying again and, of course, eating chocolate.

It's a wrap: Christmas wrapping

Our dad once estimated that our mother purchased 250 gifts at Christmas. This was for us three girls with a few aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends thrown in (who were lucky to net one each). We think he was a little shy of the actual number.

While we can see our father's point that this was a tad excessive, we can't help but try to carry on the tradition. What are we teaching our children, you say? Relax. The spoils ain't what they used to be.

PSI
How can a budget-wise family fill an entire living room with presents, edging out even Santa in PSI (presents per square inch)? Pull the furniture in closer to the tree the night of. What was once a spacious great room is now the size of one over-filled closet, bursting with, if not 250 presents, the illusion thereof.

Go Big
Boxes come cheap. What's more exciting than seeing a huge box under the Christmas tree? But wait. Anyone, any age, loves the irony of finding a tiny, tiny (also wrapped) present inside. It's a game! Run with it. For children, the game begins when they discard the gift and commence with the best present of all: the box.

If you can come up with 2 or 3 cardboard boxes the size of your Great Grandma Simmerman, you are golden. Not only will they offer great PSI (forget global warming for this one day — increasing your footprint is a plus), they'll have a fort they can leave you alone in until school starts up again.

Flashy
Go for presents that make noise or light up. A crying baby doll? Leave her on. Wrap her. Kick her box every chance you cross the living room. Your child will be almost certain that she knows what's in the box. Let the investigation unfold.
Consider a tractor or pick-up truck with lights. Screw it, leave its headlights on when you wrap it, all night, all week if you have to (the kids will anyway the first chance they get). One vibrating, flashing almost-guessed gift is worth 10 quietly wrapped shirt boxes.

Lumpy & Ugly
Did you buy a Barbie swimming pool? A fire engine with an extension ladder? We urge you to miswrap them. Resist the urge to put these in a big box (remember, those are for the small gifts). Instead, bundle those unruly suckers up with one arm tied behind your back. Use lots of tape, duct tape if you have to. Make it ugly. Leave pretty for your grandmother's gift.

Give this thing attitude, enough to fill the room. Extend the ladder, attach Barbie to it. Pose her about to leap into the pool from the ladder. Have Ken trying to stop her or better yet, rate her. Wrap him and her and their heads all lumpy too. This will be, hands down, the first present your kids rip open.

Unwrapped
Don't forget the surprise factor of leaving a single toy unwrapped, on top of the (hollow) heap of overboxed presents. Give them the instant gratification of a fat fluffy teddy bear you got for just $4.99 when you bought $50 worth of screaming dolls at Toys "R" Us. The teddy bear will be the crème de la crème, the king on the throne, and the victory will be yours.

Well, no matter what your budget is this Christmas, we hope you take time to be a little creative with it. It's not about the number of gifts, we know. It's the thought that counts. But, remember, with a little sleight of hand, it can look like you came up with both this year. Merry Christmas!