Father’s Day: a time to celebrate the patience, understanding and determination of fathers everywhere. And what better place to do that than the annual Brickworld Chicago Convention? It certainly took all of these traits and more as my wife and I took our 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son to the huge gathering of LEGO enthusiasts, but it was well worth it.

Founded in 2007, Brickworld started in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, where Adult Fans of LEGOs (AFOLs) could meet and interact in a single ballroom of the Renaissance Convention Center. Today, Brickworld is a multiday event for fans of all ages, taking up almost the entirety of the convention center and has expanded to a series of conventions throughout the country.

The event is open to exhibitors and attendees who have planned all year to share the experience of LEGO through panel discussions, presentations of new build techniques, and the construction of tremendously detailed displays of all things LEGO. It’s these beautiful displays that draw in the locals throughout Father’s Day weekend.

The sight of over 100,000 square feet of real-world re-creations such as the White House and Chicago Theater, ice hockey rinks, locomotive trains, Star Wars battle scenes, and entire cities built using nothing but LEGOs is just awe-inspiring. My children were instantly mesmerized by everything they could see and were enthralled by displays of their most recent interests such as Minecraft worlds and life-size Pokémon’s. They delighted in the minute details such as a Starbucks barista serving drinks in a city landscape and gleefully pointed out Easter eggs such as Thor climbing the Statue of Liberty. It proved difficult to get the kids to move on from one display to the next, but thankfully they realized there was more to see.

And while you could literally spend all day admiring the display exhibits, Brickworld is not just about looking at LEGOs. A large separate room is dedicated to the fun of building, where attendees could add to a LEGO Dots graffiti wall or help build up a large downtown square. My kids’ favorite part of this room were the two tables easily holding over 100,000 red and green bricks made available for kids to let loose with their imaginations to rival those displayed elsewhere in the convention. While my kids had a blast putting together various structures, including an awesome robot, my wife and I took the chance to take a seat on nearby chairs and rest our weary feet.

And of course, what convention would be complete without dealers selling their wares? Numerous booths were filled with LEGO sets old and new, ready to go home with a lucky kid and parent. Where last year my son zeroed in on the first fire truck he saw, this year he was more patient and looked closely at what was available before deciding on an off-road ambulance. His sister, meanwhile, spent a lot of time looking for individual pieces she could use in building out her own ideas at home. Many tables had “build a figure” sections, with parts for heads, bodies, legs and more, neatly organized for visitors to go through and create their own designs. The kids showed amazing patience as they looked for just the right parts to make the figures that would come home with them.

A bastion of fun and imagination, there’s so much going on at Brickworld that two days seems hardly enough time to take it all in. As we walked out of the show, my kids gleefully examined everything they were taking home while excitedly discussing what we had seen. Going to Brickworld has helped them open up their imaginations and made them lifelong fans of LEGO. And as I told them, there’s more to come, next year … .

— Jason Fleigel, guest blogger