Baby Squared : toys

Hulk Hogan Wants a Cookie

Roper — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:45:00 GMT

We have major toy storage issues in our house. Because we don't have a dedicated "playroom" for the girls, and because their bedroom is upstairs (and we're not, most of the time), the majority of their stuff is in the living/dining room, wedged in wherever we can find space for it: on the shelf underneath the coffee table, on the floor underneath our wall-mounted bookshelves, and (sigh) on and in our antique tiger maple sideboard. We've also got a couple of big square baskets where we keep smaller toys, but they're really too large and deep for the job -- you can't easily find things in them -- and as a result, Alastair calls them the place where "toys go to die."

This weekend, in an attempt to recussitate some of said dead toys, I dumped out the contents of the baskets in front of the girls. They immediately seized on the WWF (now known as WWE) action figures from Alastair's childhood: Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik.

"He's wearing underpants!" Elsa said (of Hulk Hogan). "He got a muck-tack!" Clio said of the Iron Sheik. (Translation: mustache.)

So, all weekend, the Hulkster and the Sheik (a.k.a, their "mans") were the toys of choice. They slept in the girls' beds, they went to the playground with them in the girls' doll strollers, and they got "baths" in tupperware containers full of water in the kitchen. (Which is really a good thing, because, you know -- wrestlers get sweaty.) It was particularly sweet to see the girls attempting to cover Hulk and Sheik's eyes with washcloths while they were washing their hair, to keep the soap from getting in their eyes.

By the way, this baths-for-toys thing is actually a pretty good indoor activity for toddlers / preschoolers -- one of those "why didn't I think of this sooner?" ideas. All you need are a couple of tubs and some water -- plus a little dish soap, if you want to make bubbles -- some towels and/or washcloths, and various plastic dolls, animals and action figures. Our baths started out with just the Hulk and the Sheik, but it was so much fun that Dora, Dora's mom, a frog, a fish, some Playskool people, and some random plastic clown figures of uncertain origin all jumped in too. It kept Elsa and Clio occupied for a solid half hour. Bonus: if your kids are as messy as mine, part of your kitchen floor will end up getting washed as a result!

But back to wrestlers. Hulk Hogan (who Elsa, inexplicably, started calling "Mrs. Hogan" at some point in the weekend) and the Iron Sheik (or the "Ironing Sheik" as Clio called her -- perhaps a housewife pal of Mrs. Hogan's?) also came with us in the car to our friends' house on Sunday afternoon. The whole way there, they demanded milk, waffles, yogurt and other of the girls' favorite foods, which I had to imaginarily hand back to them from the front seat. At one point, we heard Elsa say to Mrs. Hogan, "Oh, you want a cookie? OK, but you have to finish your dinner first." The Ironing Sheik also got his diaper changed while we were en route, which must have been embarrassing for him, with Mrs. Hogan already being in underpants and all.

Within a few days or a week, the girls will probably have moved on to other toys. But it's been fun watching them bond with a couple of 1980s professional wrestlers. Especially since -- confession time! -- I have a special bond with professional wrestling myself. Not many people know this, but when I was a kid, I did some acting and modeling, and one of my plumbest gigs ever was a job for the WWF fan-gear catalogue, circa 1985.

Yes, I'm absolutely dead serious. (And if posting this photo here isn't proof that I love you and am thankful for your readership, I don't know what is.)

Hulkamania!!

Happy Thanksgiving, Babblers.

PS -- Shameless husband promotion: Alastair's new kids' album, A Cow Says Moock, is now available! Take a listen and place your holiday orders at www.moockmusic.com

The Land of Haunted Toys

Roper — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:17:00 GMT

Do you guys have these toys, too? The kind that spontaneously start making noise or flash their lights or otherwise turn on out of the blue, when nobody is within ten feet of them? And make you feel, for a moment, like you're in some mediocre horror movie? Except, the haunted toys aren't so much creepy as they are, well, annoying?

We've got this roller push-toy thing that, when you push it, shouts out "A! B! Ceeeeee!" in this androgynous, nasal voice and then plays the alphabet song. That is, it's supposed to. But it got left out in the yard a couple of times over the summer and got wet. (Also, um, I got it from the curb of a neighbor's house on garbage day.) So, now it only works intermittently, and primarily when no one is touching it. Alastair and I will be sitting there in the living room after the kids are in bed, reading aloud to each other from Dickens or discussing macro-economics, or, you know, watching 30 Rock, and suddenly this little voice will sound out from the toy boxes: "A!" (Actually, it's more like "A?") and we both jump.

I've racked my brain, digging back into musty memories of high school physics, to try to think what might compel this toy to suddenly express itself. The obvious answer is that things shifted a little -- a butterfly sneezed in Indonesia or whatever -- and the movement triggered the sound mechanism. But I swear to you, it has happened while the thing is lying on the floor with nothing else around it. To be honest, I'm not even sure there are batteries in it.

We've also got a Leapfrog Music Table that breaks spontaneously into song on occasion. It's got some jazzy little numbers on it, and it's usually the one of the scat riffs that sounds out of nowhere -- a woman's voice singing, "Ba-ba da-pa ba-pa da-pa bee DOT dowwww!" In this case, I like to think that it's the tortured soul of whatever poor, aspiring singer/actress whored herself to the toy company to make some cash, when what she really wanted was to be playing Sally Bowles on Broadway. I am waiting for the day when the toy says "Oh, screw it!" and bursts out into "Don't Tell Mama."

The Leapfrog Music Table lady is actually one of the less annoying trapped-in-a-toy voices, as toy voices go. The worst -- the absolute worst -- is the singing shape sorter Cookie Jar that someone gave us. A cloying, sticky-sweet woman's voice with waaay too much vibrato and "smile" in it. I can just see the woman in the recording studio -- a slightly deranged-looking ingenue with crossed eyes and pipe curls, standing on her tiptoes, index fingers pinched to thumbs in the air, trilling "Shapes are in my cookie jar! Triangle, heart and star!" And really loving it. Feeling it. If that toy ever starts spontaneously singing, I'm calling an exorcist.

Oooh, ooh! Babble editors -- you guys should do a 10 most annoying talking/singing toys feature sometime! Please consider my totally fucking annoying Cookie Jar.

Other contenders?

The Bean Box, and Other Delights

Roper — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:29:00 GMT

Phew. Just made it through an entire weekend -- well, Thursday afternoon through today -- on my own with the girls, temperatures outside in the 20s, without going insane.

Knowing Alastair was going to be away, that the weather was not going to be outdoor-activity-friendly, and that I was fighting a cold and a potential backslide into depression (I won on both fronts -- Yahoo!) I planned out the whole weekend ahead of time. I lined up a trip to our local family network's drop-in playgroup, a playdate, a birthday party, a few hours of sitter time, and a friend over for takeout and a movie one of the evenings. It may sound a little anal and ridiculous, but I've decided that planning really is key to not going nutso over the weekends, especially when the weather sucks, and double-especially when Alastair is away. Structure, structure, structure!

I also created a new indoor "toy" for the gals, inspired by some of the suggestions you offered up in response to one of my posts from last week: the Bean Box. It is, as you might suspect, a box full of dried beans (I know; clever name, right? I'm a writer and stuff.) It's something of a variation on the indoor sandbox idea, except it doesn't take up as much room, and can be put away when playtime is over. Here's what you do: take a shallow box of some sort and put it on the kitchen floor, dump a few bags of dried beans into it (I used chick peas, kidney beans and intriguingly speckled Romas), add bowls, shovels, scoops and other containers, and you've got yourself at least a half hour's worth of toddler-tainment.

(A wine case for all seasons: it has served as toy box, stepping stool for the girls' climbing structure, and now -- the Bean Box.)

Bonus: only minimal parental involvement is required with the Bean Box (tm). I played with the girls for a little while, showing them how to scoop the beans into bowls, pour them from one bowl to another, etc. but they were just as happy to sit and play on their own. I just occasionally intervened when there were getting to be more beans on the floor than in the box.

That's the one drawback of this activity: It's kinda messy. But in a relatively clean way. You just sweep the beans up, along with whatever else is on your kitchen floor, dump 'em back into the box, and go back to your magazine or your cup of coffee or your Facebook account or whatever.

If the box is big enough, your kids can also play "bath" in it, as demonstrated by Elsa, below.

The Bean Box (tm), if nothing else, is pretty sound evidence that I am out of my depression. A few weeks ago, I would never have had the motivation or creative capacity to do even something as basic as this. Or, if I had done it (which I wouldn't have), it would have felt like a miserable and exhausting trial: I have to go to the STORE to buy beans? And then figure out what to put them in? And then...ugh...CLEAN THEM UP? The very thought of it would have nauseated me.

But in reality, I am totally the kind of person who would cheerfully whip up a Bean Box (tm) for her kids, and reap satisfaction from its success, as I am doing now. It's great to feel like that person again.

The best things in life

Roper — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:00 GMT

On a few recent occasions, I've noticed that the girls have shown interest in other kids' "pretend" toys -- dollhouses, train sets, play farms, etc. -- so I started keeping my eyes open for something along the same lines to add to their toy collection. (The toy collection which, incidentally, is gradually overtaking our living room, spreading like a brightly colored, plastic rash.) I did some Craigslist searching, bid halfheartedly on a Fisher Price Noisy Farm on eBay (and didn't win), and posted on my MOT club listserv, but to no avail. In the end, it was Freecycle that did the trick.

Freecycle, in case you're not familiar with it, is a network of community groups/ listservs for giving and getting free stuff. It's a great way to get rid of things you don't need any more but don't want to bother trying to sell or wouldn't be able to, and also a wonderful way to score a whole variety of random stuff for yourself -- everything from computers to books to extra zucchini from people's gardens. Its main purpose is to reduce waste, but it's also a great way to save money. So if you're both cheap and green(ish), like me, you absolutely must check it out.

When I tried to explain the concept to my husband he was aghast. "You mean people just give stuff away? For free? Why don't they sell it? What's the matter with these people? I don't like it." I reminded him that while he was an economics major in college, he'd ended up becoming a folk singer, and it really wasn't very folk-singer-ish of him to be skeptical about such a lovely, communal sort of system, now was it? (He didn't really object anyway. He just likes to play Ricky Ricardo to my Lucy whenever I come up with some kooky new harebrained scheme, like exchanging free stuff with random strangers.)

Anyway, I posted on my local Freecycle list to see if anyone had a dollhouse or toy farm or the like that they were giving away, and a few days later got a response from a woman in the next town over who had a Dora dollhouse, complete with furniture, that her daughter didn't play with anymore, that she'd be happy to hand over. Wahoo!

Now, if I had my druthers, of course, I'd give the girls a lovely, handcrafted wooden dollhouse constructed by unionized elves and painted with organic, all-natural paints. I'm not a huge fan of plastic toys based on TV shows or other trademarked characters, and at this point the girls don't know Dora from a small, explorer-shaped hole in the ground. But druthers are expensive and this dollhouse was free. Free, I tell you! And as trademarked characters go, Dora's probably not a bad choice, right? She teaches kids Spanish and Latino culture and...um...explores things. More importantly, the girls love the dollhouse, and I got to feel like a total hero bringing it home.

The first thing they did was try to sit on the little dollhouse chairs. Ha! I find this so funny and so fascinating: they know it's a chair (even though it's only three inches high) and therefore assume -- quite logically, if you think about it -- that it's meant to be sat upon. Then we put the dolls (it came with Dora's mom and some little boy with a backpack. Diego?) on the beds and said "Night night." The real hit, though, was the miniature jungle gym, complete with slide. After trying to climb onto it themselves, the girls figured out that they could make the dolls go down the slide. And they even said, "wheee!" as they did it, just like they do at the playground -- totally unprompted. So cool! I love seeing them figure out this concept of pretending, drawing on material from their own lives.

Unfortunately, they also figured out how to trip all the little devices in the house that can "talk," so for the next hour I had to listen to Dora screaming things like "LET'S GET SOMETHING TO EAT FROM THE REFRIGERATOR! EL REFRIGERADOR!" Fortunately, this feature can be turned off.

Watching the girls play with the dollhouse, both me and Alastair grinning and laughing, I was reminded of pictures of my brother and me on Christmas morning, playing with new toys, our mother or father looking fondly -- even giddily -- on. As a kid, you have no idea just how much fun it is for grown ups to give you things. I'm sure that the joy I took -- and continue to take -- in watching Elsa and Clio try out their new toy is ten times the joy they get from playing with it. What a delightful and surprising thing to be able to experience this part of childhood again, but in a completely different and more profound way.

And did I mention the dollhouse was FREE??!!