I subscribe to Freecycle. As a Freecycler, I’ve passed along some pretty cool stuff and picked up some pretty cool stuff. There have been duds. The trio of giant wicker pumpkins comes to mind.
It’s a bit like gambling. Or hunting. You have to catch sight of your prey and strike early, decisively, convincingly. Sometimes when I email, I beg. Sometimes I attach winsome photos of Jonah.
This week I scored a pair of toys, the details of which I had no information on other than that they were Fisher Price and had a castle and pirate theme, respectively. In retrospect, I should have sent a follow-up email asking about the age range. Or something.
But I’d won and thus I was committed. I took Jonah with me to pick up the toys, which meant I really had no way out – unless he saw the box and rejected it. Which didn’t happen.
A giant box, full of small plastic pieces. The first thing Jonah saw on top was this wagon made of “logs” with medieval looking torture devices on the sides.
He loved it.
It took Scott diligent online searches and immense patience to find and decipher the instructions and build the two separate entities (Pirate Island, Dragonmont Castle).
And then we discovered the weapons. The red dragon has a hole in his chest and a button on his back so you can insert the small red flaming spear in the hole and press the button to launch it.
The Pirate Island has a canon-type thing that similarly accepts and expels similar small red plastic spears with spiny ball things on the ends. In fact, the spears and ball things are interchangeable. Clever, that.
He loves the launching. I won’t say that it’s actually violence that interests him, although he is quite gleeful about the idea of destruction lately.
We also got him a wrecking ball toy for Christmas, because he so loved a book Daddy had checked out for him from the library called Smash! Crash! And because he asked Santa for it.
So much for all my hippie aspirations. I think other than breastfeeding until he was over a year, and avoiding TV until he was 3, I’ve pretty much officially now broken every attachment granola mommy aspiration I ever had. Okay, so we haven’t put a toy gun in his hands yet. But we are FREAKING SURROUNDED BY THOUSANDS OF PIECES OF BRIGHTLY COLORED PLASTIC.
Sigh.
Then again, it’s not so much the loss of the idyllic fairy forest wooden toy wonderland that I’m aghast at but rather that my OCD brain has to keep track of that many more TINY FREAKING OBJECTS.
(I didn’t even tell you about the drill-as-unlit-litebrite-toy we got for him. So many screws. So, so many.)
The wrecking ball has a happy face on it (because every vehicle and item of machinery – particularly if related to construction – in a child’s world apparently has a soul). The toy came with a building that is like a puzzle – you put the pieces together to build it up and then knock it down.
Jonah explained that it was the hospital. Which I think is a perfectly reasonable way to work out his feelings about Daddy’s recent three-day disappearance.
And now everyone who expressed concern that Jonah’s love of trains might be a touch too obsessive can be assured that he’s expanding his range of interests.
However, he is not fickle. Today in preschool, he made a “nest.” A piece of paper, colored orange with crayon scribbles, and folded into an arguably nest-like shape – which you can totally see if you know what you’re supposed to be looking at.
It’s for the baby trains, he explained to me. The mama train lays the eggs and the baby trains hatch out of them.
Of course.
At least I am sending him to this Waldorf-y preschool that has only wooden toys and does so much with encouraging creativity from basic materials, rather than having all the creativity molded for them in China.
You should see the long intricate trains he can build out of plain wooden blocks.
Then again, also today when I first arrived to pick him up, he was building with Duplos. Which made me happy. That our chosen preschool has noble aspirations, and is flexible with rather than slavishly obedient to these ideals. They allow brightly colored plastic at their house too. <Wipes brow.>
Jonah was actually NOT making a train. It’s a spaceship, he announced. A spaceship cherry picker. On wheels. Called cherries.
Of course.
With all this going on, how in the world does he have time for so much discourse about poohpooh?
As of about a week ago, it’s his favorite topic. As he explained to me today, “Sometimes, when I say poohpooh I mean I have to go to the potty, and sometimes it’s a funny joke.”
He cracks himself up with poohpooh fairly regularly.
We get that it’s funny, and that sometimes he’s trying to get a rise out of us. So we’re working with these ground rules:
No poohpooh conversations at the dinner table.
No calling other people poohpooh – that’s where it really took off at first: “You’re a poohpooh!” he’d say, and then burst into giggles. Not polite. We are trying to encourage polite.
No poohpooh conversations in crowded public places.
Other than that, he’s pretty much free to let his imagination roam. I figure it’s better if we don’t get all freaked out and reactive about it every time he says it.
Basically, I’m relying on my improv background here. I “Yes, and…” his poohpooh.
This morning, he told me a story about a cookie, a cupcake, a doughnut, and a poohpooh. All of them had arms and legs, he said. They put on their pajamas. They read books and brushed their teeth. And they went to bed. The End!
He’s also using a lot of gibberish. Made up words and names for things. With a similar silliness. It’s my motherhood Tai Chi. I just roll with it: Uh, huh. So BurrBurr went to Manimoo? Great. And then what happened?
It’s kind of fun.
And if you can’t tell from this post that the boy talks nonstop all day long. Let me tell you. The boy talks. Nonstop. All. Day. Long.
I can’t imagine where he gets that from.
We tried to do the wooden toy thing, it didn’t work out, though we are picky about the toys we do bring home.
As for the weapons, my boys made them out of everything, sticks, blocks, you name it, and it was a gun. They do have a few toy weapons now, though the rules are no shooting people.
So funny. In Germany, the kids go through a “kaakaa” phase. Same diff.
He is so much like Megan! Is gibberish a 3 year old developmental milestone? She is constantly making up names of her “pweetend fwends” that are complete gibberish. It’s very funny to me, but she really takes it seriously and seems to love inventing words.
We are also low on plastic at home, low on toys compared to most of our friends actually, so in our case the kids get the woodsy granola stuff at home, but we don’t keep them away from the Little People/Barbie/Fisher Price/China crap when she’s out in the world. As long as there is balance and the kid’s exposed to both styles of play, seems all good to me.