A Million Tiny Pieces

This Christmas, I realized a universal relationship that I hadn’t noticed before: the smaller the child, the larger the Christmas present. For example, Santa brought my 2-year-old daughter a toy kitchen that is approximately the size of my own kitchen, and a Barbie house that is larger than my first apartment (and contains significantly more furniture). My 21-year-old stepdaughter, on the other hand, received gift cards (approximate dimensions: 2” x 3” x 0.005”).

I also realized another universal relationship: the larger the toy, the smaller the pieces. And the more numerous. My two young children received a combined total of roughly 27 Christmas gifts. Those 27 gifts contained a combined total of approximately 7,953,246 individual pieces, the majority of which measure less than 1 cm in any dimension. Within any one square foot of my home at any given moment, I am likely to find 4 pieces of plastic fruit, 37 Legos, 23 Duplo blocks, 7 fireman or policeman figurines, 4 miscellaneous Barbie-related items, 14 erector set components, a minimum of 2 wheeled vehicles of varying size, and 3 magnets shaped like either articles of clothing or construction vehicles.

Please don’t get me wrong; I’m not upset that anyone gave these gifts to my children (the majority of them were either purchased or suggested by myself and my husband). It’s not like anyone in my family hates us enough to have given the kids, say, a drum set or a ride-on fire engine with functioning siren. And I love that my children love playing with these toys so much that they’re always out and scattered around. But I never realized how much longer it takes to clean up the contents of a 12” x 6” x 2” box containing 2,000 individual items (for example, a Lego building set) than it does to clean up the contents of a 12” x 6” x 2” box containing five individual items (for example, a Barbie doll wearing a bikini and high heels).

But what I also realize about toys containing a zillion components is that, much like cars and computers, they carry with them a kind of planned obsolescence. At least once a day, I step on and crush a Lego item which I must then discard. Several times since Christmas Day some pink plastic item from Barbie’s house has gone permanently astray for whatever reason. Various items have already succumbed to irreparable chewing damage. By my calculations, at this attrition rate, 83.6% of the toys my children received for Christmas will be gone by the time next Christmas rolls around. And since my children will be that much bigger, their toys should be proportionately smaller, so the annual net increase in toy volume will be only around 11.8%.

At that rate, by the time their toy collections increase enough that we need to move to a bigger house, my son will be ready to enter college and we can turn his room into a toy storage shed. Either that, or my husband and I will just move into his room. I figure he’ll have some really fun toys by that point.

Boys vs. Girls, Part ???

Objects my son has used as a gun in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

Objects my daughter has either kissed or talked to in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

 Maybe my children aren’t typical. But given the same exact toys, they play with them very differently. Sit them on the floor and drop a laundry basket on top of their heads and my son will either announce that he’s a bad guy in jail or roar like a lion, while my daughter will merely giggle and announce, “Peekaboo!” Give them a doll in one hand and a truck in the other and my daughter will carefully wedge the doll into the driver’s seat of the truck (after carefully kissing them both and then making them kiss each other, of course), while my son will run the doll over with the truck.

 There are times when they’ll play together with the same toys. They’ll each choose a racecar and make vroom-vroom noises together. They’ll each pick a stuffed animal and march around the room making the appropriate animal noises at each other. They’ll sit in front of the Elmo’s Potty Time video giggling together at the Dirty Diaper Blues song and clapping when Elmo rides his tricycle. They’ll take turns kicking and rolling a ball back and forth. They’ll alternate between hugging each other and chasing each other around the room at top speed while screaming at the top of their lungs.

If they can be so completely different and yet still be so devoted to each other, it gives me hope for the rest of the world.

Toys: Boys vs. Girls (The Second Child Edition)

Back in July 2010, I wrote a blog entry about the difference between how boys play with toys and how girls play with toys: http://sandysmotherhoodblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/toys-boys-vs-girls.html Revisiting that entry now that I have a child of each gender only serves to reinforce my belief that boys and girls play differently. It’s certainly true in my family, at least.

My son has been obsessed with cars and trucks ever since he was small. Even before he could walk, he would crawl over to anything with wheels and attempt to spin them – a grocery cart, a stroller, a skateboard. I always made sure to keep a matchbox car or small truck in my purse to keep him entertained. And since his obsession continues, my daughter (who is almost 2 years younger than her brother) has grown up surrounded by cars and trucks. And when she was tiny, she was also content to zoom them across the table and to watch their wheels spin in fascination. But now that she is old enough to be interested in what toys are or represent, rather than just their physical size and feel, she is much less interested in cars.

Her toys of choice are generally soft items like stuffed animals and dolls. She loves to hug them and coo to them and make them kiss each other. For her, I keep several small plastic animals in my purse. Giraffe and tiger often make an appearance at a restaurant, hiding behind cups and salt shakers and playing peek-a-boo with her, and just generally allowing themselves to be kissed and pawed and snuggled and loved. If on occasion I have forgotten to put a car in my purse and I give my son the same toy animals to play with, instead of kissing each other and playing nicely, they will roar ferociously and attempt to eat each other.

There are also huge differences in how they choose to play with the same non-specific toys. Give them both a box of Legos and my son will alternate between building and knocking down towers and designing some kind of gun or cannon, whereas my daughter will stick a single Lego on the index finger of each hand and click them together with fascination, and then pick out all the flowers and animals that are part of the Lego set.

If you let them choose from the same group of toys, they rarely choose the same things. At a local play area, my son runs directly to the train table where he immediately starts redesigning the track while my daughter makes a beeline for the play house and begins to “chat” on the phone.

 

Of course, there are often similarities in their play, especially when it comes to imagination games. They both love to run, and squeal, and be tickled, and play hide-and-seek. They both love to dig in the sand and splash in the water and scribble with crayons and chalk. They both love to strum the guitar and pound on the piano keys and bang on anything that bears a passing resemblance to a drum. They love to make an old paper towel tube into a trumpet. They are both fascinated by sticking stickers on things.

But when it comes right down to it, their play is fundamentally different, because THEY are fundamentally different. And although I would never tell my daughter that she can’t be a construction worker or an engineer simply because she’s a girl, and I would never tell my son that he can’t be a nurse or a teacher because he’s a boy, I do believe that their future interests are going to be very divergent from each other just due to their natures, which are in part due to their gender. Because they’re different. And viva la difference!

 

June 17 Photo: In Your Bag

I’m always carrying a bag. I’m a woman, so I’m usually carrying some kind of handbag or purse. I’m also a mother of two children in diapers, so I’m usually also carrying a diaper bag. (And if I’m not, you can be sure the handbag or purse that I AM carrying is doubling as a diaper bag.) And since today I’m also a vacationer, you can bet there are plenty of bags around me right now.

Now that I stop and think about it, I’m not sure how many bags I do actually have at the moment. I’m in the process of moving my family from staying at a hotel to pitching a tent at a campground, so my minivan is impressively full of bags. As well as the previously-mentioned handbag and diaper bag, I have a bag with a full-size, three-room tent in it, complete with stakes and a rainfly. I have three sleeping bags. I have a pack-and-play crib in a bag. I have a suitcase full of clothes. I have a bag of baby food, a bag of kid snack food, and a bag of adult snack food. I have a bag of trucks and bubble stuff. I have a bag of extra diapers, wipes, diaper rash cream, formula, and bottles. I have a bag of pillows and blankets. But perhaps the most important bag of all is my bag of snugglies.

The blue-jammied bear with the saucy red curl (aka “Bear”) is my son’s current bedmate of choice. The dog on the right with the jingle bells and the wiggly bone (aka “Jingle Dog”) keeps my daughter entertained in her crib when she’s on the brink between sleeping and waking (in either direction). The owl with the built-in teething ring (aka “Owl”) keeps her entertained in the car (at least, it does until she catapults it behind her car seat where I can’t reach it). And the plastic cup with cheery Jessie the Cowgirl on it (you can see we do better with toys that come pre-named) keeps my son occupied in the car.

Without these four dear friends, long trips with two small children would be much more difficult and tear-filled. You could say there’s a little bit of travel magic in my bag.

June 15 Photo: Yellow

This yellow toy backhoe is one of my son’s very favorite toys. Those of you familiar with the technical terms of construction vehicles will immediately notice that this truck is not technically a backhoe. I call it a backhoe for the same reasons we still address former presidents as “Mr. President”: a) because they used to hold that title, and b) because both are due a measure of respect for their service.

It goes without saying that my son is pretty rough on toys. He is 2-1/2, after all. And his family nickname is “Destructo-Boy.” Fortunately, he does not seem to mind all that much when he slowly breaks his toys, bit by bit. He happens to be both bright enough and creative enough to find new ways to play with each toy’s current abilities.

For example, this backhoe originally had a front-loader bucket on the right and an excavator bucket attachment on the boom arm to the left. The front-loader bucket broke off first, and when that happened, my son used the truck as an excavator, parking it on top of the toybox and reaching its boom arm down below its own wheels, pretending to scoop up dirt. Once the excavator bucket fell off, he declared the truck to be an impact hammer, and happily made “rat-a-tat” noises while banging the barren boom arm on every surface he could reach. And when the boom arm itself falls off, as it does on a regular basis, he simply calls it a tractor and pretends to use it to knock down silos.

I love his creativity and cleverness in figuring out how to use each variation of the truck, but I love even more that he never stops to mourn the loss of a function, he merely finds new things that it can do. Wouldn’t it be great if we were all like that? Instead of whining or complaining or being disappointed about something that we can no longer do, we should all learn to rejoice in discovering what we can do – perhaps even things we never noticed we could do before!

Not a bad lesson to learn from a little yellow toy truck.

Toyland

Ryan is very creative when he plays. He plays with just about anything that’s handy – a saucepan, a spoon, a vacuum nozzle, an empty box, my feet, his own feet. But he also loves to play with his toys – sometimes in the way they were designed, and sometimes not. Plastic stacking rings can, of course, be stacked on their peg – but they can also but balanced on one’s head, dropped into a bucket, or have a ball balanced in them. Balls can be rolled and bounced as intended, but also climbed on, stuffed into various cubbies and crevices, and licked. (The licking thing is true about pretty much anything he can reach with his tongue, but semi-see-through balls are especially fun to lick, since crazy Mommy can easily be tempted to lick the other side, which is a source of endless amusement. But I digress.)

So a few days ago, I decided to capture Ryan playing with his toys on video. So here, for your entertainment, I present “Two Minutes of Toys!”

So now if anyone ever asks me what Ryan and I do all day long, I can show them this video and explain that this is what we do all day. Over and over and over and over again. This, times 30 times an hour, times 12 hours a day. With the occasional break for eating, napping, and diaper changes.

Have I mentioned lately that I have the best job in the whole wide world?

Toys: Boys Vs. Girls

Boys play with trucks. Girls play with dolls. For many years, this was just how it was. Then came the 1970s, and all bets were off. Boys were encouraged to play house and dress-up. Girls were encouraged to play cops and robbers and trucks. But in my personal experience, girls and boys just play differently naturally. And there’s nothing wrong with that! There’s a reason that gender roles have evolved, and it’s because boys and girls are fundamentally different.


If I’d ever doubted that, I’d have had to change my tune after watching Ryan this morning. He discovered the Barbie stuff that’s been stashed away in the corner of the den since his sister was a little girl. A few months ago a friend of mine was visiting with her three daughters, and they discovered the same stuff. In an instant, Barbie’s house was set up for a party: food on the dining table, chairs set up in the living room, Barbie herself with primped hair, high heels, and a party dress. Her Jeep was parked sedately out of the way behind the house. When Ryan got at Barbie, however, she was completely ignored, her house was a mere backdrop, and the true star of the show was the Jeep. He pushed it back and forth, flipped it over to spin the wheels, and fiddled with the seatbelt straps. He eventually noticed Barbie again, but instead of fussing with her hair he used it as a handle to smack her against the Jeep, and instead of putting high heels on her dainty feet, he tried to chew on them.

Granted, some of this behavior is simply because he is younger than the girls. But I’m convinced that the majority of it is because he’s a boy. He likes using his strength to explore, by hitting and chewing and stepping on things. He has the manual dexterity to handle small objects but he’s much more interested in using that dexterity to figure out how things work, or to make noise with them. Simply put, he plays like a boy.

And Herb and I naturally play with him like a boy. We roughhouse with him, tossing him in the air, playfully (but gently) knocking him over, wrestling with him until he dissolves into helpless giggles. I’m sure if he were a girl we (or I, anyway) would be much more sedate in how we play. We’d still toss “her” in the air, but we’d be more gentle about it. Instead of making his stuffed animals growl and tickle him, I’d teach “her” to gently pat them. No doubt we’d spend less time taking things out of “her” hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to treat girls and boys differently. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to treat two boys differently if they have different personalities and different likes and dislikes, so why would you treat a boy and a girl the same if they have different personalities and different likes and dislikes? I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who disagree with me, and who will give their daughters trucks and their sons dolls. And that’s fine. But I won’t do that, because I know what my son does with dolls. He uses them to whack trucks.

A Box Is Better

My blog entry from a few days ago about technology got me thinking back to the toys of my own childhood. The most technically advanced toys I had were my Lite-Brite and my Easy-Bake Oven, both of which ran off a single 30-watt lightbulb. They were pretty spiffy, but I don't remember them being my favorite toys. One of my favorites was a big play oven that my dad had made with some pressboard, white paint, and some knobs cannibalized from an old range. Another was a tall rag doll with elastic straps on his feet so you could attach him to your feet and dance with him (I suspect it's his fault that to this day I always want to lead). And there was always great excitement in the house when it was a rainy or snowy day and my mom made homemade play-dough. The oven didn't actually cook anything, the doll didn't talk or cry or wet himself, and the play-dough was just a lump until you made something out of it. In other words, the toys I loved most were toys that needed my imagination to come to life.

There's something to be said for cheap toys. How often have we joked about kids on Christmas who throw away the toy and play with the box? There's a very funny video of my stepdaughter at age 2-1/2 opening a large, beautifully wrapped Christmas present to find an elaborate train set. Her parents ooh and ahh excitedly over the trains, while she completely ignores them and proceeds to dive into the box, hiding under the packing peanuts and popping up with delight, over and over again. She was much more entertained making a game out of the box than playing with the train set.

Yesterday morning I began to suspect that Ryan will be the same way. He's been very chewy lately, gnawing on his own hand and munching contentedly on his burp cloths or any other fabric that comes near his mouth. I've tried offering him some of his fancy teething rings and toys, but he has no interest in them. And then yesterday morning he spent nearly an hour mouthing the zipper on his jacket, chasing it with his mouth, and happily chewing on it again. This is not a child who needs fancy toys and gadgets.

I suspect that most children are the same way, at least until they are given, and get used to being surrounded by, toys that do all the thinking and imagining for them. Why make up conversations with a doll when she already talks? Why create your own superhero with a towel for a cape when you have a complete costume that comes with the hero's backstory? Why make up silly songs when your toy provides its own music?

A box doesn't talk, or have a backstory, or know any songs. But because of that, it can become a spaceship, or a laboratory, or a kitchen, or a fort. You can change it from the heroes' lair to the villains' den in the blink of an eye. It can be an Indian tepee, a schoolhouse, and an igloo over the course of a single morning. It has no limits except your imagination!

I'm sure that at some point Ryan will want to spend all his time playing video games and watching DVDs and television (or whatever the new technological equivalents are by then). But I truly hope that before he reaches that stage, he spends a lot of time just playing with boxes.