Under the Duplo Sea - Jellyfish

Duplo Jellyfish Capturing a Snack

When we were little, my younger sister and I hero worshiped our older brother John (that view has been updated, but that is a topic for another blog). We thought that everything was cooler, funnier and more exciting when he was around.  We always wanted him to go swimming with us, and John always wanted to stay inside to read his book. To silence the nagging, John would tell us that if we went swimming for 30 minutes and didn't get stung by a jellyfish, he would come out and swim too. Happy with the promise, my sister and I would fly down to the water and play in the surf. Thirty minutes later, we would emerge from the water and rush to tell John that we hadn't encountered a single jellyfish. In late summer, when the Gulf waters are as warm as bathwater, this would hardly ever be true and our bare, skinny legs showed the telltale marks of a jellyfish sting. Needless to say, John hardly ever went swimming with us.

Duplo Jellyfish 

   Sometimes at the end of the summer, the currents would bring so many jellyfish close to shore that it was impossible to swim. You couldn't be in the water for more than a few minutes without feeling that electric sharp pain of the jellyfish venom. As if in compensation for the days you couldn't swim because of the abundance of jellyfish, the Gulf waters would glow green at night as the waves churned up the pieces of bioluminescent jellyfish. It was a spectacular sight.
   When we first started to build the Duplo jellyfish, we tried to use just the standard Duplo blocks (the ones with square and rectangular faces). All of our attempts came out too clunky. So for the body of the jellyfish, we ended up using a cupcake top from the LEGO DUPLO Creative Cakes 6785 set. The jellyfish tentacles are the gas pumps and water hoses from various Duplo sets that have cars and firetrucks (LEGO DUPLO Gas Station 6171, DUPLO My First Fire Station 6138, etc).
   I added the silver fish (from LEGO DUPLO My First Zoo 6136) as a snack about to be caught in the jellyfish's tentacles and the starfish after my husband asked if we were building a spaceship.
    The jellyfish was a big challenge to build with Duplo blocks. If anybody out there has any pictures of some Duplo jellies, we would love to see them!