Legoland!

School starts for Malcolm tomorrow, and we decided to do one more fun thing before he heads back.  I took the kids to Legoland in the morning before meeting Kevin for our regular Tuesday lunch.  Luckily, Legoland is pretty close to where we needed to be and it was good choice since today ended up being cold and rainy.  We got there shortly after it opened, and it was great for a while, then several field trips showed up and it got really crowded, and I got a bit cranky.  I'm glad we went, but was also glad to leave when we did.

 This was actually taken on our way out.

 This was also on the way out, but the doorman is there to greet you on your way in.  He struck the pose without me asking.

 The first thing we did was to walk through their "mini-land," and the first section was Chicago.  It was night when we went in, and the buildings were all lit up.  By the time I got my camera out, it was dawn.

 More of Chicago.  There was lots of animation, like kids on see-saws and construction workers moving.

 Malcolm spotted Navy Pier and the tall ship and was excited since we had been there a couple of years ago.

 With Indiana Jones, the first of many characters my kids didn't know, but stood next to anyway.  One of my biggest complaints about Lego is how their choices of licensed lines doesn't match up with the ages of their demographic.

 I asked both kids to stand next to R2D2 which they did willingly.

 Dorothy wanted no part of Darth Vader.  I asked Malcolm if he would please stand next to him and he looked the statue up and down, then asked in a worried tone, "Is he going to move?"  I went and patted Vader on the shoulder and assured him that he wasn't real and couldn't move.  Just to be safe, Malcolm still wouldn't stand too close, and you can see he's keeping an eye on him just in case.

 I convinced him to look at me, but he still looks pretty worried.  As soon as I said I had it, he literally ran to put some more distance between them.

 There were several scenes from the movies, and many had little buttons you could push that would do things.  Here, Dorothy made the Millennium Falcon take off and land.

 He had no idea who Harry Potter and Hagrid were, but he humored me and stood with them anyway.  I promised that we would start reading the books fairly soon (our list of books to read is getting really long).

 Dorothy didn't like the size of Hagrid, but liked this generic brick guy.

 She was very enthusiastic about Santa and the snowman and asked me to take this one.

 They didn't just pose with giant sculptures, but it was difficult to impossible to get pictures of many of the other activities.  Here, Malcolm is building a car to race on a track.

 Dorothy, working on her car.

He was big enough to do this ride by himself, but I had to go on with Dorothy.  Malcolm rode it three or four times and Dorothy did it twice.

It was pretty fun, but I was glad it was small enough that we were done by lunch time.