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We've spent a lot of money on toys in the last nine years and I think it's fair to say that there's a small proportion of those toys that got one use or fewer (there's still a bag of Christmas stuff under our dining room table that I don't think has got a play yet). I don't like it, but it's beyond my control. Father Christmas keeps stuffing this crap down the chimney. He was never so generous when I was a kid, but then probably I was too naughty. The judgemental old fucker.
If they play with things, of course, they get broken or bits got lost or fall apart. I spent hours putting together Ernie's Scooby Doo Haunted House and had to do so repeatedly because it didn't stand up to the kind of stress that my son put it through. And even though that was a popular toy it was too scattered into pieces within months and ended up in the bin.
One of the most successful play things we have, is almost inevitably, a cardboard box. We've had it for a few years. It contained a chair for Phoebe's desk so was a good size and Phoebe and me turned it into a puppet theatre (I have to pass down the family business) with her draping some bits of fabric and stuff over the hole to make it like a proper theatre.
She hasn't used it as much recently to be fair, but it's sat in the corner of her room for months and got use as a place to hide, to sit, to pamper the cats. We are trying to sort out our stuff and get rid of things we don't use, so the huge box was an obvious candidate for removal and whilst Phoebe was OK to let it go, Ernie was very keen to have it. So now it has a whole new life span. Ernie has turned it into a shop, though a bit of a creepy one because all the merchandise is sold through a small hatch with bits of material hanging down. But his prices were good. He sold me four toy cars for 20p and loads of cuddly toys for a pound. He has some polished bits of stone that he says are diamonds and they cost a million billion trillion pounds so I couldn't get them. But I cleaned him out of everything else and the money I paid went into the safe.
I left my newly bought stuff by the shop and went to do something else. When I came back my stuff was gone and he told me that there was a rule that if things got left by the shop then the shopkeeper got to leep them. I said it would have been good to know about this rule before, but he was insistent that it had to be obeyed, so I had to buy everything again. The prices were all different. It was chaos. But it's the only shop i the area of my house and so my hands are tied. I left all the stuff by the shop again. Hope it's there when I go back.
Ernie likes his toy cars so I showed the kids that game I used to play pretty much endlessly as a kid (until I got a snooker board and Subbuteo) of setting up races between two cars to see which one would go the furthest. You have to work through all your cars that way and then there's a second round where the winners take each other on in pairs and so on to the final. In my day the little red open topped beach buggy car was my favourite and usually won.
Ernie wasn't as in to this game as I used to be, but Phoebe loved it and did an extra level where the losing cars had to face off against each other too and were placed in order and then any losing car (even it it had won a heat before) had to take on the worst car and then work its way up the ranks taking on each car at a time. If just doing the regular cup competition led to stone clearing, then God knows where this kind of obsessive behaviour will end up!
I was almost too tired for play today and hope I am going to catch up and regain my energy soon, but I love having these two playmates now, to make up for my own childhood when I played alone (I mean I had lots of friends and a brother and sister, so that can't be fully true, but I did spend an awful lot of time duelling against myself in various activities - happily so too. What a fucking weirdo. Thank God I don't do anything like that any more).
