Having grown up in the ‘80s on classic LEGO Castle sets with my brother, I knew that when I had kids, these perfect learning toys would be a staple in my own home.

To my delight, my wife and I were blessed with two boys who love LEGO sets even more than I did! LEGO building has fit beautifully into playtime and homeschool class time alike. We’ve used them to teach everything from math (counting brick studs and multiplying length times width) to history (recreating historical scenes) to physics (building structures to see how much weight they can hold). For us, LEGO is the ultimate educational toy and a homeschooling family’s dream.

Our whole family gets in on the creativity as the boys bring creations into the living room to show us. Brenna and I regularly offer back advice along the lines of “That’s really cool! Hey, what if you added this here?” and the kids’ eyes get wide and they go “YEAH!” and run off to develop it further. And it’s always fun to sit together and build newly purchased sets on the living room floor.

This past summer, a health crisis on my part set our world spinning. I had to rest at home most days, and it looked like I would be out of commission for at least six months. I could hardly do design work and upcoming puppetry gigs were out of the question.

My friend Dan is a LEGO genius at custom creations with his own daughter, and I had wanted for a long time to really do a big project with my own boys, but work and home duties kept us from investing the necessary time for many years. But here I was, couch-bound most of the day. When my boys’ LEGO Magazine arrived, they showed me a contest for building a Mars vehicle.

The creative fires suddenly flared up! I had a dose of energy at the thought of doing something creative again and FINALLY doing the big custom LEGO project we had put off for so long! The professional designer in me woke up and I instantly had the boys get paper and pen. “Okay,” I told them, “Let’s start with a brainstorming session!”

After sketching many ideas, we talked about each one and whether it would make a good entry and why. Was it too complicated, was it not “Martian” enough, the function of each vehicle, etc. The next step was making suggestions for how each others’ ideas might be improved. They picked up right away on this type of creative process and we had some really fun directions. We each picked one to work on in the set of three sketches we had chosen as our own finalists, helping each other’s creations along the way.

Now, I share my office in the house with the LEGO collection. Sometimes it gets a little overwhelming, and every parent knows how wonderful it feels to step on a tiny brick while in socks, but it’s all worth it as they keep me company during my computer work and it adds an extra dimension of positive creative energy to the room. The day after sketch day, we sat down on the floor of the office room and got ready to build.

I’ve sculpted in the past and I custom build all our puppets, but custom “sculpting” in LEGO bricks is its own challenge! But what a rewarding challenge, combining healthy team work, physics, color schemes, counting bricks and overall three-dimensional concepting. Another important lesson we learned is that if you don’t have “just the right piece,” it takes further creativity to figure out what else you can use instead and still get it right. (It was also an exercise in compassion and generosity when one of the boys discovered that we DID have just the right brick, but his brother was already using it.)

After a few days, we had our three entries and I realized something. I had forgotten about how ill I had felt and was feeling somewhat energized again after so many weeks of rough stuff. It felt good!

With my newfound energy, we set up a small photo studio with a chair and a piece of fabric and tripod. I showed them how to do a basic photo shoot. We had the photos printed and sent them in with the contest essays (a typing lesson for them). We agreed the whole time working on them that if one of our entries won, we ALL won as a team.

Several weeks later, my recovery had continued strongly after that creative boost and we received an envelope with the LEGO logo informing us that we were one of the winners! In early January we got our issue of the magazine with our entry photo in it!

2007 was a rough year for our family, but a major positive highlight was this contest and all we learned from it and the effect it all had on my recovery process.

So there you have it. LEGO Therapy!