So I read that as Power Torch. And I’m thinking to myself, “Man, how cool would that have been - a beginner oxy-torch!”
Excuse me while I start some coffee…
I am experiencing this with our first child as well. We are both on the lookout for toys that require interaction and imagination, I hate the ones that do something when you push a button and that’s it. They are usually so expensive and you get tired of them after you watch them do their thing a few dozen times, and that’s the end of them (or the batteries die.) Even worse are the ones that are motion activated or noise activated so something is always making a commotion somewhere in the house.
I have good luck at secondhand sales, you can see what toys held up and get good ones. Our son is only 3 months old but we are picking up things like Legos and blocks, construction and building sets and board games (do kids play board games any more?) And any good books we can find - real ones, not ones that require batteries.
I am going to try to hold off on video games but I know kids are starting them younger and younger. Has anyone else seen that commercial for the educational video games where the mother is saying ‘you can stay up late…if you play your video game!’ 'You won’t get into college unless you play your video games!" It’s like children never learned the alphabet or how to read before electronic instruction came along.
I know some parents who are proud of how well their toddler children can play video games and computer games. I know computer skills are being taught earlier in school so that’s not all bad, but I am sad sometimes at how play seems to be being replaced with interactive electronic things that guide the child through a specific scenario.
Anyway, I’ll get off the soapbox now. I’m sure my child will be complaining that I don’t buy him anything good 
Oh, you mean the one where’s she’s shouting from another room in the house? And is never in the same room as her children? Great parenting, that one.
We managed to hold off on video games (a few computer games excepted) until WhyKid had spinal surgery this summer at age 11.5. The Rich Uncle bought him the newest flashiest GameBoy, and WhyDad and I sorta went :rolleyes: . It was useful during recovery though, as he wasn’t allowed to do much and was in pretty severe pain. He’s allowed to play with it on car trips as well, and his friends bring their GameBoys over for a gaming sleep-over about once a month. Who knew these things link together? I think it’s the hive mind forming. He’s been really good about not abusing it, unlike some of his friends. One in particular I’ve literally never seen without the GameBoy in his hand. Even at parties, BBQ’s, school plays. It’s pretty sad, really. He’s a strange, sad little boy who’s been in therapy for six of his 10 years, mostly because he feels like he has no friends and people don’t like him. Um, dude? Put down the GameCrack and try talking to people. Poor thing. 
Oh wow! I wish I’d had those kinds of toys when I was little. I love the King Arthur’s Court playset and the kitchen stuff. Wash Day Fun playset? How cool! I gotta say the scarves are brilliant! Oh, what I could have done with those when I was a wee lassie.
Now I have yet another reason to want kids. I just know I’ll have tons of fun playing like a kid again.
The worst thing about that video system commercial is that I don’t know of any self-respecting kid who would fall for it. I bet the games are dull, dull, dull.
There are a lot of companies that make swell toys. I have my eye on a Brio wooden dollhouse that looks great! (ok, maaaaaaybe it is for me as much as it is for her! I mean, they have a red car that looks almost like my mini! 
)
There is a toy store around the corner from me which sells genuinely nice toys. I vastly prefer she have one nice toy vs. 20 crap toys. It makes me sad though, that a lot of the really nice toys are also really, really expensive. Not all kids have Grandmas like mine does.
The problem with the new toys is that the companies seem to make them one use only. They won’t last long enough for multi-generational use. They also make it seem like it is YOUR fault that the toys don’t work.
The lady on the FP hotline (who did not tell me about the extra balls, byw) kept telling me, “Maybe you are doing it wrong?” to which I replied,“Lady, I have a college degree. If I can’t figure out a simple operation such as moving a hippo so that it gobbles a block, do you really think my toddler will?”
I can see it now. There will come a time when my kid will ask for the latest Playstation for Christmas and I will comment “you know, when I was a kid we played with a pan and a box…and we liked it!”
Sigh…I am becoming such a mom.
I think we have more broken, “too loud and annoying”, or “large and heavy enough to be used as a weapon on his big sister” toys lying around than we do actual, useful toys, or we did until I got rid of most of them.
Target has a great line of old-fashioned toys out now. Wooden blocks, real musical instrument toys that have no buttons to push, and even those wooden block bench thingies where you have to hammer the little wooden peg in the hole (and it has no flashing lights or music either!).
You can also get a lot of mileage out of huge sheets of butcher paper (or whatever it’s called), and a box of crayons or paints. No bells and whistles required.
I’ve been buying old Fisher Price Little People toys for my twins - those sets from the 1970s. Getting them on eBay. It’s vicious! But I’ve got a whole empire ready to go once they’re old enough.
Year before last, when my youngest was only two, we got a great price on a huge set of solid wood blocks; there are six trays, all full of different kinds of blocks, that stack inside one another. The whole stack fits in a wooden cart on wheels that has a rope for pulling it around. We put it away for almost a full year, and gave it to her the Christmas she turned three (well, actually, she turned three 4 days after Christmas. This Christmas, she’ll be turning five. Guess what toy she plays with almost every single day? Yup. The wooden blocks.
I have two college degrees and I can’t even imagine how to get a hippo to gobble a block. All the ones I’ve ever encountered prefer plants.
Don’t sweat it about the quality of the toys(although someone gave one of the “touch and go” toys to one of our little ones and I agree they are singularly useless). The toys that survived from your youth were the subset of the toys you had which were good enough to survive. There were certainly ones that didn’t hold up to your own playing.
Still I’m not a big fan of toys targeted at small children. Especially toddlers. They are not ready for toys which require fine motor skills or careful handling. Electronic toys or toys with embedded electronics are usually either a waste(meaning they only figure out how to work a tiny subset of the features), or too fragile(like the grinding motor in the touch and go toy). We’ve gotten our little ones through these ages by letting them play with whatever interests them(within reason, the heater for the fish tank may look like fun but it shouldn’t be played with). Plop a real drum pad down and give the kid a drumstick, they’ll love it.
In general the best toy for any kid is their parent(s). Flexible enough to get into all kinds of fun shapes, no batteries, self-repairing, makes varieties of interesting sounds, big enough to climb on, knows how to chase and be chased, all kinds of cool things about parents. Second to parents would be boxes. Big empty cardboard boxes. A parent who is handy with a craft knife and can carve these into cars, castles, submarines(did this myself when I was a kid, with a working periscope), airplanes, etc. really increases the mileage on a cardboard box. Kids love to mimic their parents so their own little “house” or “car” tends to thrill them. Plus you’re not disappointed when it falls apart because A: You spent no money on it, B: It’s just a freaking cardboard box!, and C: There are other cardboard boxes to be found.
I’d recommend the World Book Childcraft Encyclopedia to pretty much anyone. The edition I had when I was a kid had an entire book dedicated to arts and crafts that got SO much mileage. When I was very little mom would get ideas and make the item for me to play with or help me make it. We could customize it with my favorite colors and textures and that made it more special. When I got older I discovered lots of stuff I could do on my own(including a cardboard box submarine with a working periscope). I’m not sure about the current edition, but it probably has a similar volume as well as volumes of great stories and ideas for activities and such.
The Childcraft encyclopedia set my mom had when I was little has become a family heirloom and currently resides with one of my older sisters. Maybe one day it will come to live with us and my kids can discover the fun.
Enjoy,
Steven
Second the Hearthsong plug. An excellent source for toys other than the Mattel/Wal-Mart/Toys R Us axis. “Different” toys. You look at it and go, “…well, that’s…different…”
http://www.hearthsong.com/hearthsong/welcome.asp?sc=1005&body_sc=1005&occ=1005&firstEntry=Y
If you ever buy something from Plow & Hearth, you will also get Hearthsong catalogs every Christmas.
Oh goody, a place to bitch about Lego sets! My boy has a ton of Legos and they are mostly Harry Potter. This moron that I used to be married to would buy the kid an HP Lego set, put it together, then hand it over to be played with. It’s been murder getting the boy to grasp the concept of using the bricks to build something that isn’t pictured on the box. The ones I had as a kid were generic sets that you could make anything with (and were expected to). I played with them well into my teens.
My boy’s favorite toys are actually these three cardboard boxes. He has decorated them with markers. One is a time machine, one is “The-world’s-most-powerful-computer-ask-me-a-question”, and the other is a Transmogrifier. (He’s a big Calvin & Hobbes fan.)
One more comment on the subject of toys: when I give gifts to young people, I usually give a chalkboard, eraser, and a pack of colored chalk. I spent a few gazillion hours playing with mine when I was a kid.
…which reminds me, https://www.childcrafteducation.com/ has superb huge vinyl animals, big enough for toddler safety, and sturdy enough to stand being left out in the sandbox. We bought the Animal Families set years ago (ouch!), but found it well worth the price tag, as Bonzo simply adored them, and those El Cheap-o Wal-Mart plastic animals tend to fall apart after a season’s hard galloping up and down the bedroom.
The giraffe is about 9" tall. They’re huge fistfuls of solid vinyl, not the injection-molded MadeInChina animals.
I was (and still am) a huge fan of stuffed animals. Cuddly enough for bedtime, soft enough that if they are used as a weapon they don’t hurt, and full of imaginative goodness.
Another big fan of wooden blocks. I had a set when I was a kid and I wish I still did.
I still play board games. I spent an hour and a half playing memory last night. :smack:
My daughter loves these! We have some of the newer ones, which, sadly, yes, are a little too modern (i.e., the Dad always has a cellphone in his hand, etc), but at least they are silent toys. I’m very happy to report that my girl has been bypassing all the stupid talking/beeping/annoying things and setting up her Little People around their dinner table, etc.
My favorite gift to give is still a package of cool paper and a box of crayons. Most kids love it; they love to draw and it’s a good, quiet way to spend an afternoon. Most parents love it because it’s a good quiet way to spend an afternoon. Heck, I’ve given Aaron some of my old spiral notebooks from courses I never intend to revisit and he’ll spend hours just scribbling.
Some parents, however, take one look at the paper and crayons and roll their eyes because it’s not the latest toy with bells and whistles. These parents are cretins.
Robin
I would like to take this opportunity to HIJACK this rant with my own semi-comprehensible rant:
Dear Hotwheels,
Could you explain to the grown children out there that want to share in the joyous experience that is your race track product and die cast metal cars why in the fucking name of OG there are NO STRAIGHT-AWAY Orange TRACKS available for sale at any store that I have been too. I know, I’ve looked. I have friends looking in stores for me.
Yes, apparently I can buy them off of Ebay.
THAT is not THE POINT.
I don’t want to buy my children the Crash Canyons, the Zero-G Starter Set, The Cyborg Attack Set, The Raptor Blast Track, The Croc Crunch, The Ferrari Test Track, the Turbo Turner Raceway or any of the Car Wash or Goo-thingies you try to Fucking fob off on us parents!
And we buy the above forementioned products hoping we can get more tracks to put them ALL together for some GOOD TIMES. Every time, we come away from opening another box with more turns, more curves, more WTF is this part?
Toyus Interruptus.
First, do you bastards know how fucking complicated the crash canyon is to put together after each crash? Pretty Fucking Hard, you evil toy mongers from the lower depths of Toys backwards R US. Secondly, the parts are easily lost. Thirdly, if they are not lost or broken your instructions are only comprehensible to someone with a cranium the size of Basketball.
Look, all I want to do is hook up yards and yards and yards of tracks for my kids in the basement. The straight tracks. The straight orange tracks that connect together with a little plastic tongue. I have 5 fucking hotwheel track sets and, this is no newsflash to you, you corporate motherfuckers, I still don’t have enough straightaway track in ALL these tracks to make it more than possibly 5 feet.
Five Fucking Feet!
This is, in kid terms made into adult terms,like have a half inch penis.
What is the fuckign point of setting up five feet of track to have them zoom hither and yon to crash head on together? There is no reason to even get out of bed, I say, if you cannot put together enough track to create enough torque to dent the fucking drywall!
You bastards.
You evil fucking bastards.
You are ruining our kids fun and, more importantly, ruining the adults fun.
I just want the Hot Wheels Tracks of my Ute! With the little motorized carwash thingie that propelled the cars around and around and around and around and around and around and around in its hypontic fashion that entertained myself and my dog for hours on end. Sometimes I would take away the DEATH DEFYING turns to watch the cars fly to CERTAIN AND KNOWING DEATH to land under the couch and possibly fall into the GAPING HOLE FROM HECK known as the missing floor heater cover thingie that I had lost after using it as a jailwall for Barbie, the harlot.
Sometimes I would just shoot the cars at the wall because…I was a kid and had the ability to launch cars like shooting off an anti-aircraft missle.
BUT YOU BASTARDS have RUINED my fun.
Go Fuck Yourselves and Your Little Dog Too,
Shirley
I’m getting all excited just LOOKING at the Hearthsong stuff and I don’t even have kids yet! But I do know what I’m getting my friends’ kids for their next birthdays and Christmas.
I remember all the crap about Cabbage Patch kids when I was in elementary school - and I admit it, I fell for it. But I was eight. My parents and my friends’ parents were grown-ups and they should have been better about it. I don’t think my mom was ever horrible because I got my first CBK after the major rush for them, but I remember seeing the stories about them and wondering how anyone could be so stupid.
Ava
I don’t know if you recall from the Christmas party at my house, but Mr Baboon is a drummer. She already has a drum pad*, as you can very well imagine. The drumsticks are not an option right now, as I am not a big fan of the impaled baby look.
*dw has a drum set available in purple with pink sparkles. Rumor has it that Santa is bring her a real snare to start off her set. woo! (yeah, I know very well that the best part of the gift, in her eyes at least, is the wrapping paper).