Photo A Day, Days 26 & 27: "Enjoy the Little Things" and "Under My Feet"

I suppose this could be considered cheating, combining two days into one. And even though I was a couple of days behind, I honestly intended to write two separate entries for this weekend. But when I found my subject for “Enjoy the Little Things” and realized it was also perfectly appropriate for “Under My Feet,” I couldn’t help combining them. And when you see my photograph, you’ll understand why.

Tiny toys are the bane of every parent of small children. As much as kids love big play kitchens and oversized stuffed animals and giant toy fire trucks, it seems like they spend even more time playing with the tiny cheapo toys that came from McDonald’s or in a 30-pack from the Dollar Store or the local party store. (Or the tiny not-so-cheapo toys that came from the Lego store.) And these tiny toys have two major problems: 1) they are so small that they are constantly getting lost (between couch cushions, at the bottom of Mom’s purse, under the seat of the car, in the pocket of a seldom-worn jacket), and 2) they are constantly – and painfully – underfoot.

The most obvious case of tiny, underfoot, hated-by-parents toys are Lego blocks. Not the big Duplos that you can convince your kids are Legos until they’re about 3 years old, which are much softer underfoot and come in bright colors that can be seen from the moon, but the genuine article, the miniscule, same-color-as-the-carpet, only-one-way-to-make-a-spaceship-from-this-set, 3,000-pieces-per-package, sharper-than-a-serpent’s-tooth, Daddy-will-you-put-this-together-for-me stuff of parental nightmares. The one minor advantage to Lego blocks, of course, is that since you have 500,000 of them around your house, any one piece that gets broken or “accidentally” thrown away will not be missed by your child. (It may suddenly be missed by you when you are attempting to construct that scale model of the Millennium Falcon that your kids have been begging you to build for weeks, however.)

But with pretty much any other tiny toy, your child will know – and weep – when one is missing. At the moment, my daughter’s favorite tiny toy is a pair of plastic pteranodons that Santa bought by the dozen at the party store and tucked into her stocking on a whim. Now, we can’t leave the house without mother and baby pteranodon in tow. Conveniently, they’re small enough to fit both of them in a pocket or purse, and they’re soft plastic so repeatedly dropping them on the floor in church or, say, a dance recital (not that that has actually happened, of course, but hypothetically) is not disruptive to others nearby. But because there are so many places they can be tucked, there are also so many places they need to be looked for every time they disappear. I now plan on leaving the house 15 minutes earlier than usual no matter where we’re going so we can stage a massive dinosaur hunt before getting in the car.

But I’m glad that my kids do know how to enjoy the little things. Even if those little things do tend to end up under my feet.

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.