And this is Kitty out enjoying nature. 
Looks like a fireman Lego with a Darth Vader cape and falling-off headphones, you might think. Oh, how wrong you’d be.
Kitty, the combination of Lego man and Lego cat, the unit is called Kitty, caused a lot of conflict in our household last week.
I was dutifully cleaning up the dishes when I started to hear screaming coming from the area my kids had disappeared to. They always make themselves scarce when there’s work to be done. Someday soon they’ll be trained on dinner dishes.
I went to investigate, and as I got closer, the screaming became clearer.
“You’re an idiot!”
“No, you are!”
“Get out of my room, you’re always taking my stuff.”
“Kitty’s mine! Give it back!”
As I rounded the corner, my youngest hurtled by, clutching something in his hand. I reached out to grab him.
“What’s going on?”
I got a stereo synopsis of the situation. The kids were fighting over Kitty.
I yelled, ” Stop, ” and asked them to hold onto Kitty while we figured things out. The yelling continued, so I yelled stop again.
I called a time-out. “Okay, we all need to calm down, and then in ten minutes we can discuss what’s going on here, but we all need to get to a point where we can talk and not yell. I can’t help you two figure out anything while you’re yelling.”
So my kids went to their respective corners, not easily done. When my eldest is ramped up emotionally, he needs ten minutes alone in his room. Really, he needs twenty-four hours, but we’re working on ten minutes so he doesn’t lose an entire day. My youngest gets thirty seconds of screaming his head off, stomping, slamming doors. Thirty seconds. It’s fun, but it’s what we have to work with. It used to be three minutes. We’re whittling it down.
The kids had their time-outs, and I used the time to strategize and breathe before becoming mom-mediator. Not enough time.
We started to discuss what to do. Both kids wanted Kitty. Both were convinced Kitty was theirs. So first we explored that.
“How do we prove who Kitty belongs to?” I asked.
They started arguing over which set Kitty must have come from. A fireman set? Seemed reasonable. Then they argued over which kid had gotten the fireman set. They tried to get me to cast the deciding vote, but honestly, I couldn’t remember. I tried the analytical approach: you, oldest child, never liked firetrucks, you liked SpongeBob, so in theory Kitty is more likely from a set belonging to the youngest. This led to a lot of protesting from the older one, who explained that various pieces had come from multiple sets he’d creatively combined.
Still stuck. They dragged out every Lego manual to trace where each piece had come from. We did this for a while, until my oldest remembered he’d taken most of the manuals to his dad’s.
All the while, I was trying to help them think past “this is mine and therefore not yours.” Could we find equivalent pieces to build a second Kitty? Apparently not, there was only one cat. Could they take turns? Clearly not.
So I tried getting each of them to see the other’s point of view. I asked my oldest to explain what Kitty meant to him. He walked through the whole inspiration behind Kitty’s creation, how he’d picked each piece and why they belonged together as one unit. I’ve since forgotten the details, but at the time I could tell he felt real pride in what he’d built.
As he explained, my youngest rolled his eyes and huffed. I asked him to stop and listen, he’d get his turn too.
He did. And he repeated almost exactly what his brother had said, for nearly identical reasons. He loves his older brother and wants to be just like him.
I believe my oldest actually created Kitty. I also have a very non-self-aware youngest who genuinely believes he did.
After hearing what Kitty meant to each of them, I wanted them both to get to play with him. But they were still dug into their positions. I’d hoped that hearing each other out might lead somewhere, a duplicate Kitty, a sharing arrangement, even one of them stepping back and saying Kitty clearly meant more to the other. No such luck. They were stuck, and so was I.
I had to pull out the judge card.
“Well, it looks like we need a custody arrangement for Kitty. I’ll hold onto him overnight while I think about who gets the first play shift.”
I’ve had Kitty ever since. He’s been living in my car, riding around with me. I’ve become quite attached.
