Fun toddler lego thing

My brother and I played with legos ALL THE TIME as kids.
I'm pretty sure my parents still have several 30-gallon rubbermaid containers full of legos.
I really hope that our kids play with legos. Not that we'll pressure them. But we probably will.

Because Emma is still at the eat-tiny-things age, we have duplos for now. (The bigger toddler-sized legos.) My parents gave Addie a little duplos set for Christmas and we gave her this duplos book.

When I ordered it, I thought it was a book that had duplo-building boards inside that would let you build duplos on the book. Wrong! It's just a silly story that has pictures of how to build the animals throughout. She didn't really care about it at first, but we kept it anyway. We usually build duplo towers and knock them over. But, more recently, she figured out that you can build what's in the pictures (both of this book and of the duplo set she got from my parents) and now, she wants to do it over and over. She can't quite get them all right by herself yet, but she's close.

See the picture of the 4 pieces involved to build the tiger?

She likes matching the legos to the picture and trying to figure out how to put them together to look 'right.' 

Honestly, at first I was disappointed that it wasn't a book you could build legos on. Because how cool would that be!? 

But, actually, now that she thinks it's fun, I'm a fan! Not just because I have good memories of playing legos as a kid and I want her to think it's fun too, but because legos are so good for the whole creating-building-thinking-visual-spatial part of the brain. (That's the scientific term for it.)

I realized that it's a pre-cursor to the way lego instructions are. 

Plus, she's so proud when she gets it right. 

Once she's built all 4 animals, she likes me to read through the book and she pops the appropriate animal out and says "peekaboo" along at the right time in the story. 

Here's the one we have. There are others too - farm, fairy tail, "let's go", etc..  

Maybe a toddler near you would like one? 

Happy building!!!

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