Wednesday, February 29, 2012

What a ploy...

I hate plastic. With the exception of an ice cold plastic bottle of Cherry Pepsi and a Rubbermaid 18 Gallon storage tub (or 12)...God I love storage tubs, but I digress...

I hate most toys. With the exception of books and blocks and crayons, but are books and crayons even really "toys"? I mean if you gave an underprivileged child whose name you picked off a fake tree in Walmart the day before Christmas Eve a big box full of books and crayons, would they REALLY think Santa came through with "toys" that year? I'm just sayin'.

I REALLY hate plastic toys. Most plastic toys, or "ploys" as I call them, either blink or beep (or worse, they do both) and a blinking, beeping plastic toy is guaranteed a spot on the "Top 10 Gifts To Give Your Neighbor Whose Mailbox Is The Kind That Looks Like It Was Made By Little Tykes" list. Most ploys break...

a) upon trying to get them out of the 600 twist tie wraps that hold them prisoner to their plastic packaging, ("plackaging" if you please)
or
b) within 3 minutes of your daughter finally getting her hands on them to play with after you've spent an afternoon slicing and dicing your knuckles on the 600 twist ties...you get it.

Occasionally, only if you are lucky, a ploy will break upon stepping on it, while others are apparently made out of the plastic they use to make prosthetics. For the Hulk. Not to mention, ploys seem to reproduce faster than two 'tween rabbits in this house (for the record I DO NOT know how fast 'tween rabbits would reproduce in this house and I WILL NOT be finding out anytime soon, but I DO know that if left alone in our playroom with the door only slightly ajar, Barbie and Ken Duggar would bury me alive in their plastic offspring.)

If I had to do it all over again, I would put my foot down early. When asked what type of a Baby Shower I would like, I would reply, "Anyone that brings a plastic toy will be dead to me. And my baby." I would not only ban ploys from my own house, I would forbid anyone to offer ploys to my children on play dates, at school, or at birthday parties in an effort to keep them sheltered from the insanity. I would do my research so that at Mom's Groups I could quote studies that Chinese manufacturers lace plastic toys with meth (and then I would watch all the desperate, sleep deprived moms lick the Lights & Sounds Ball Popper.) I would hold my head high as I revealed that I had brought my own 18 Gallon Rubbermaid storage tub full of "safe" toys for the gathered children to play with. I would smile and nod pretentiously while all the other mothers ooh'ed and aww'ed at how engaged their children were with my tub full of wood scraps and washcloths. I would answer (with just a slight tone) questions like, "Do you attribute the lack of plastic in their lives to both of your children's obviously advanced intellect?" and I would be the mom that finds joy and delight in paying three times as much for a birthday gift solidly made from earth friendly and rejuvenating bamboo to be given to a child that my son has only known for three weeks and only sometimes remembers his name. It would be glorious, my ploy-free life. A girl can dream.

So this week when my newly obsessed Star Wars fan asked me if he could buy Star Wars figures with his Christmas money, my immediate answer was, "Don't we have enough plastic figures around this house to play Star Wars with?" His reply, "But we dont have any STAR WARS figures to play Star Wars with." My reply, "Do you REALLY need Star Wars figures to play Star Wars? Back in my day we used wood scraps and washcloths. And our imagination."

Under protest, here is his Jedi Knight Council.

Next you see his very evil looking Darth Maul, perched on high and yielding a pink light saber in one hand and a mini light saber in the other.

And here you'll observe the child of some poor sucker of a mom allowing her son to be swept into the funnel cloud of ploys when clearly any child with half a brain can save the universe with a pink paddle saber from their sister's Fisher Price Outdoor Fun set. (Note: The child's face is not revealed in an effort to shield this anonymous mom from the embarrassment of her wavering parenting moment.)


Lastly, we observe a young man playing with his new, coveted Star Wars ploys, the ones he held closely all the way on a road trip to Northern Vermont and is happily playing with in the hotel room while on vacation.
Some parents are just so weak.

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