Lately I've been feeling like my family's house is one of those beaches where they do the marine debris clean ups every year only to have it loaded up again with trash the next year. I think I spend over a 1/2 hour every day just cleaning up plastic toys and putting them back into bins. Then the kiddos dump the bins and scatter the toys all about and I clean them up again - I'm a modern day Sisyphus. I don't think I'd mind if they actually played with the toys, but all they seem to do is scatter them and move on. They do have a few favorites - Stuey likes his cars and I try to keep these out - but for the most part they just throw them about, and I step on them in the middle of the night.
It has me hating plastic toys - and all you friends and relatives out there reading this - DO NOT send our kids plastic toys for Christmas (especially those toys with multiple plastic parts that immediately get separated from each other). I actually think my kids prefer playing with real pots and pans, rolling pins, cell phones than toys, and really, do we need cheap plastic toys? Where do they all end up? I have this horror that they all end up in that great spinning mass of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that supposedly is twice the size of North America (see Isiik's post from around a month ago - I don't know how to do those hot links but here's a try http://isiik.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-pacific-garbage-patch.html). Either that or in our landfill. Can we really afford to have them end up in either place?
Not sure if this is exactly related, but the other thing that depresses me is discarded toys. Did you ever read the 'Velveteen Rabbit'? I hate it when Nora or Stu tire of a toy and stop playing with it. It makes me very sad. I think of the toy as a discarded pet. So to see all these toys that were never really loved in the first place, and almost immediately discarded .. ... .. Well you get my point. But it has me thinking of the Puppy Farms that supply vet stores.
Personally - I think we should ban plastic toys or at least tax the hell out of them. It might actually clean up the floor of our house, and I don't think our kids would ever miss them. Patrick
Post script: Friends and Relatives - send us your old cell phones for Christmas! They love real phones!
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2 comments:
I couldn't agree more! And the Velveteen Rabbit still makes me tear up...I got a copy of it for Emmy but I decided not to read it to her until she is a bit older.
Amen! If I get one more plastic toy in this house I am going to hang myself in a Toys R Us! I have been extremely motivated to rid our house of the plastic crap toys but not sure what to do with them?! Maybe I should sell them on ebay as a Toy Lot and use the money to buy some blocks!
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