The Death Star Revistied

Alexander is 9! Yes really. It's quite amazing to think that he is now older than the kids on South Park.
For his birthday he asked for... THE DEATH STAR!
And it's in caps 'cause it is THE LEGO DEATH STAR- >3000 pieces, >8 hours to assemble by a team of uber geeks on YouTube, >our F'kin budget.
I thought hard about this one... Yes it was expensive, Yes it was for 14 year olds and Yes it was a complete and total max out homage to the great God of Lego in Denmark.

But there were some upsides if I played it right...
"So if you want the Lego Death Star you can't have a party?"
"Ok!"

"So if you want the Lego Death Star you can't anything else from us?"
"Ok!"

"So if you want the Lego Death Star you have to tidy your room to accommodate building it?"
"Ok!"

And I did play it right and so did Alexander; and so after a false start on his actual birthday last Thurs where his stack on personality negative equity outweighed any desire for us to give him so much as a chocolate watch we finally gave hims his BIG BIG present on Saturday night.

He was delighted and then stunned!

This kind of Lego had an instruction book the size of a Haynes Workshop Manual (popular manual series in the UK for car or motorcycle repair)- Nearly 400 pages.

This kind of Lego didn't number the bags but had 53 bags of random* Lego parts to sift through.

*They might look random but Lego actually fill each bag with high contract parts covering color, size and shape so they are easy to discern and find. However you might find the head of R2-D2 in one bag, the legs another, the body in another, and so on...

This kind of Lego had a Dad who knew just how much it cost and wasn't about to let things get off track.

This kind of Lego had a project plan and Dad was the Project Manager!

However...
By 9:00am he had managed to open all the bags and assemble the mini-figures.

By 10:00am he had traded "The Emperor", a one of a kind figure only found in *this*
kit for a 1/20th scale model of a BMX bike with the kid down the road.

By 10:20am he had got "The Emperor" back after a somewhat lengthy discussion on the merits of trading with his Mother who, I might add showed extreme restraint!

By 11:00am he was done for a while.

I carried on, determined to get to completion of the first level.
However, I was told off of not letting Alexander do it himself. He wanted it, he needs to do it.
I just wanted to see what the first floor looked like! Oh Well.

We resumed together in the afternoon and *I* completed this weekends assembly exercise by bagging up the remainder of the kit (and boy does a lot remain) into 42 sandwich bags which will come out next weekend for the next continuing installment.