to hate Lego Duplo with a passion?!

[suddenlycupishalffull]

DD is 4. She had the Lego Duplo farm for her birthday. I hate it. I hate it so much. It takes bloody ages to put together. I need the instructions for the simplest bits even though it says ages 2-5. We keep losing bricks. She can't click certain bits together that well, and inevitably it falls apart in her hands. She gets cross, I'm secretly seething. We start again with me trying to model patience which I don't have We re-build, needing the bloody instructions again. She attempts to put the little people in to play with it and the whole thing falls apart again. Cue more tears mainly mine Where is the pleasure in this? Where's the joy? It's like an instrument of mental torture. I want to throw it all out of the window.

[CultureSucksDownWords]

Don't follow the instructions, and make it how you want? Would that help?

[HiawathaDidntBotherTooMuch]

Buys the massive base plate in green. That is the grass. It is much easier to fit bricks and animals into that and it is big enough to allow for cack handedness

[Ubik1]

Duplo was one of our best toys. I'd spend time with dads making a farm or zoo or circus or whatever and then leave them to play. After a while they just built stuff by themselves.

[neolara]

Loose the instructions. Haven't you seen the lego movie?!!!!

[Nolim]

My dc loved duplo. Doesnt follow the instructions.

[stargirl1701]

Do not buy kits. Just buy buckets of bricks and let her build.

[cantgonofurther]

My dd is 3 and loves duplo but makes things her own way. All the sets have got mixed together.

[FunHouseGrandPrix]

We love Duplo here. I agree with everyone else though buy the big green plate and chuck the instructions !

[suddenlycupishalffull]

Yes I've seen the film and oh my god I'm not the Dad am I?!!!...I'm the Dad, aren't I Ok so I'm getting the whole point is that you mix up all the sets & use your imagination...She likes the smell world aspect, making homes for little people, but it all keeps falling apart, would so,etching like Sylvanian Families be better for her? and my sanity?! Or Playmobil?

[CultureSucksDownWords]

At 4 couldn't she have proper Lego? Maybe that would be better to build with?

[undermythumb]

I love Duplo - ditch the instructions except for special one off occasions where you lead your daughter through it. (And after a couple of times she will be able to do it herself.)

Get a base plate and lots of blocks. My children (2 & 4) love the sets but more because of the one off pieces in them that allows them build some great stuff in their imaginative builds - like the winch, that I think comes with the farm set, the canon etc.

Duplo is fantastic and so easy to find the missing pieces. I'm dreading the shift to Lego

[undermythumb]

Rereading your op, just start off making towers - breaking them is half the fun.

[HiawathaDidntBotherTooMuch]

My DS1 still liked duplo when he was 7yo. You may have a while of this yet ...

[SocksRock]

YABU. After three kids we have stacks of the stuff. My 7yo loves it and it is the only toy that they will all play together with. They can create amazing stuff.

[suddenlycupishalffull]

Is proper Lego less fiddly to handle then? I hesitate with proper Lego cos of her 18 month old sister who must do every she does yet is still not beyond unexpectedly putting things in her mouth, I have to watch her like a hawk when they're playing together & scour eldest's room for stray small pieces, am guessing proper Lego would be even worse for small parts?

[TheRealAmyLee]

Don't buy "real" Lego if you have an 18m old! Get a base plate and some extra blocks and play together seeing what you can build. Show her how to build a tower then let her take over.

[CultureSucksDownWords]

Proper Lego has tiny bits that might be an issue for an 18 month old.

I would just play with it however you like, make any old crazy thing just to practice manipulating it. My DS will build the weirdest things and I think it's great for imaginative play.

[Tutu1000]

I have 2 ds's who are 9 and 6. The duplo is played with as much as lego still in this house and tbh I prefer the duplo. The kids seem to be able to create stuff without me with that, but with lego they are forever asking for my help to either find a specific piece, or take 2 bits apart that for some inexplicable reason have welded themselves together. Also I prefer the duplo as I find it easier to see and therefore have impaled my foot on less bits than lego, which frankly must have been invented by the devil for how much it hurts when you stand on a piece. Also duplo is much harder to accidently hoover up than lego.

Btw if you are stressing out over duplo, do not buy sylvanian families or playmobil. Both are great toys, but have lots of fiddly bits and will annoy you for the same reasons the duplo is. Have you got any Happyland from ELC? That was one of my favourite toys as it was so robust (with the exception of doors which fell off when you looked at them), and it doesn't have fiddly bits.

I would agree with other posters though, the large duplo base plates make building stable structures much easier. Then you can also move them if you need to without destroying the building.

[Tutu1000]

I just realised ds1 is 10! Still in love with Duplo though.

[LurcioAgain]

I loved, oops, I mean DS loved duplo. We have a huge crate of it. Favourite set in terms of "playability" was the quarry set - digger, cement mixer, crane, little tube thing for sending rubble down, and the base shape could be adapted to double up as a Bond villain hollow volcano evil lair. Fab! We had loads of bricks too, and they had so many uses, from towns to extra bridge supports for the duplo railway track (another toy from the pre-school years that I look back on with immense fondness). Agree with others - buy loads of ordinary bricks and get building. And don't be afraid to mix-and-match. You can build villages as scenery for the toy railway, attach the crane to the edge of the toy garage, build furniture for the dolls' house, cafes for the toy cars to have meals in (DS used his toy cars as dolls - they were all "people") and towers higher than your child (which they then get to knock down). One of my finest creations was an entire circus ring while playing with DS and my great niece (yup, one of those odd families where the generations have got completely out of kilter).

[BikeRunSki]

If you hate Duplo for those reasons, you'll really hate Lego.

[redcaryellowcar]

We have all sorts of lego duplo, it's brilliant, we make circus trains, farm trains, farm yards. Zoos, police stations, banks (to be robbed) fire stations... I'd focus on the small world play element as the construction but probably isn't as much fun until she is a bit older.

[Littlef00t]

Loving zoo duplo with my 16mo dd, she chooses where to situate the animals on the baseplate, usually at an impossible angle, I fix it down, she looks at me in disgust, pulls it up and re-situates.

I never progressed to Lego as a child, loved building big houses and Lego was too time consuming.

[SusannahD]

We love duplo here too. We have a big green base plate that can easily be built onto. We don't follow instructions just build towers or engine sheds for the trains

[RandomMess]

Can't believe you don't have a base plate.

We only sold our Duplo (about 12 huge sets all mixed up) when the youngest was 9 but only because we were moving house!!! So much less fiddly than true lego.

Let her imagination do what she wants with it.