Marble Run

Matthew received a marble run for Christmas. The kids had opened pretty much all of the little labelled plastic bags that the over 400 pieces came in before Adrian had a chance to get in there to help and consequently we were certain that one important piece had been lost/misplaced/not part of the package. We packed everything back into the box and set it aside to be dealt with later. That box sat in Matthew's closet until last week when he decided the gears made really cool throwing stars. We had forgotten about it! As soon as I saw pieces were being left around the house I knew I had to sort through everything to determine which piece was missing and then contact the company to find out how to get a replacement.

We gathered everything up (by this time many pieces were on the floor of his bedroom), took it all to the dining room and Andrew and I commenced the sorting. Ugh. It took such a long time to go through all the pieces, but thankfully every one of them was numbered. Good thinking on the manufacturer's part! Matthew tracked down the instructions as they had also mysteriously disappeared from the box and we tallied the pieces to find out which crucial piece was missing. The parts list shows it in white as a separate piece with a little asterisk beside it to say that it comes preassembled with a few others! There is another photo of the preassembled pieces showing this particular piece in black. We checked our pile of parts and sure enough, there was a preassembled piece with that particular part in black. We'd been looking for something that was not actually missing and had put the box away for nearly eight months because of it. LOL!

It took us nearly three hours to assemble this thing, but it was worth it. It is really sturdy and the kids have been having a blast with it. Part of it is motorized and even has annoying sounds at another point, but those are not necessary for loads of fun play. I confess, I've even played with it when the kids were otherwise occupied. After all, I did give up a good portion of one afternoon and evening sorting and assembling the thing!