Step away from the Space Lego

Duplo is fab. You will see the difference

Aww no my DCs like the megabloks, moving on to duplo soon though (DS not big enough for Lego yet)

pink megablocks! Megablocks are crap enough even in non pink colours.

Stick to Lego.

My DD was given a box of pink princess megabloks, so I bought a big bag of primary colour ones to water it down a bit!

at the female Lego figures belgo linked to.

Wobbly, I think it's not so much that people gender code the bricks, per se, more the construction skills required to play with them: logic, spatial awareness and so on. And when a construction toy is ever marketed at girls, the standard product has to be re-packaged in pink and lilac, just in case the effort required to put one primary coloured block on top of another makes their pretty little heads explode.

DD, who is a budding Dr Alice Roberts and can do lightning fast maths in her head, nevertheless had pink'n'lilac Magnext bought for her by a wellwisher.

(Although, when DS1 was 2 and channelling Ariel the Little Mermaid, my DM did buy him the full pink and turquoise irridescent MegaBloks set, and mighty pleased with it he was too).

I'm really surprised that Lego is often seen as a boys toy. It's just bricks FFS. I can (very relucantly!) understand that people see things like princesses and soldiers along gender lines, but bricks?!?

Very sad :(

My DD loves Lego and all that stuff. She likes Thomas too, and come to think of it I've never seen a girl in the fan section of the magazine.

I was on a similar thread the other day which I started over a boy's surgeon outfit that I bought in sainsbo's. I was saying that in general dd1 (3) will play with anything but when we are in the shops or flicking through catalogues she is very much of the 'these are boy's toys and these are girl's toys' mentality. I also said (which I thought was rather profound even if I do say so myself ) that it is difficult to break them out of that mentality because on the one hand we are teaching them to follow rules of polite society (don't hit, do as authority tells you) but then we try and get then to break the rules of gender imposed by shops society.

Ds2 is now the proud owner of a Lego Amy pond.

Although you'd struggle to recognise her....

They seem to learn it by osmosis from other boys. And so do girls.

With plenty of encouragement at home they get over it.

I see I may have to make a run of t-shirts . . .

Watch this space.

fwiw there's a Sylvanian Brother at Home <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=www.sylvanian-families.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sylvanian-families-brother-at-home-set.jpg&imgrefurl=www.sylvanian-families.co.uk/tag/sylvanian-families/&usg=__18zu1VJoj7b1b2DS1vBpTc-V-FM=&h=250&w=250&sz=48&hl=en&start=0&sig2=6Zkf5BKXZ780stPP3N18tQ&zoom=1&tbnid=_t4FHIeh7GeRBM:&tbnh=147&tbnw=146&ei=UJ_KTcakE83TsgbRu5HNAw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dsylvanian%2Bbrother%2Bat%2Bhome%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2RNWN_en%26biw%3D1419%26bih%3D705%26tbm%3Disch%26prmd%3Divns&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=830&vpy=180&dur=406&hovh=200&hovw=200&tx=87&ty=109&page=1&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here

to save you clicking on the link, he is in a toilet

I bought it for dp for his birthday, along with the Sports section of the paper

I love Sylvanians and luckily the three DDs don't seem to follow the somewhat outdated roles assigned to the figures.

Their Bratz now..................

and of course all the nurses are female and doctors male here

Dunoon - I would like to addDinner Lady and Lollipop man.

Can I just add sylvanians mother at home
and
father at home
I know sylvanians aren't exactly set in the present but I was rather annoyed when I saw these.

Is anyone here a member of the Lego club-they send out regular free magazines? They have a page where they show models children have made and usually all the children are boys-perhaps one token girl each issue. DD gets enraged by this as she has an enormous amount of lego and she is currently working on a big Lego project to submit to the magazine. Lego is definitely seen as a boys toy in her class, very few girls seem to own anything more than the pink stuff .

DD has a princess dress I made her for a special school dress up day- they had to go as 'royals' but DD was told she couldn't be a king (by a TA-yes I did have words about that). It was a blue and purple medieval style dress and DD insisted that she had a sword belt sewn onto the side. She was the only girl who had a sword . I'll add a picture onto my profile-she had a foam sword fight in the playground which she won

We have the lego geisha!

Leia. With a gun!

My DD had NO idea that she wasn't supposed to play with cars, trains, castles, space lego, etc, or wear plain non-pink clothes before she started pre-school. Now she sometimes comes out with statements like "that's a boy's xxx", "girls do xxx", and has occasionally asked for things clearly because she wants to be like the other girls. Ultimately you can't stop the rest of society bringing up your children with attitudes you don't espouse, which is why I get enraged at people who think they don't need to be an activist as long as they bring their kids up they way they want to...

The UNTHINKINGNESS enrages me.

Even after a year of pre-school, however, DD still likes playing with her 'boy' toys as much as her 'girl' toys. I hope she doesn't get too anti-boy as she gets older, but I'm not sure how to avoid it, when such conscious moves seem to be made, in society in general, as well as in school, to polarise the sexes.

Me and my sister were mad for Lego.
DS likes his Duplo, but not as much as his toy kitchen.

Can I put in a request for a Leia t-shirt too?

I want a Leia t shirt. with a pic of Leia holding a blaster.

My girls went to a Jousting day out at a castle. In princess dresses with breastplates and swords.

Leia's a princess. With a gun.

You'll get told off for celebrating violence soon enough, but I think that's fantastic! :o