Playing Along

"It is a happy talent to know how to play." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s been a little over two months since the load of Christmas toys was dropped down our chimney. I think I have finally figured out which toys my children will really enjoy and which toys are destined for the give-away box. Weeding out the good toys versus the junk that winds up in the recycling bin took me longer than I thought it would.

With my first I was all about educational toys. I bought the black and white cardboard books, the squishy rubber spheres with different textures and of course the teddy bear that had a tape deck in the back and was supposed to interact with a child. Until the batteries wore down. Then it was a slurring predator, going off randomly but always at night. Nothing gets a parent out of bed faster than a child screaming “Mommy, the bear is going to kill me, mommy, help.”  The reading bear was quickly dispatched to the trash barrel, after a good sprinkling of holy water.

I love advances in technology, and the toys in the stores today are way more high-tech than the stuff I had. Normally I’d be all over a trend like this. But I’m not so sure anymore. Recently I saw an article about vintage toys, and it featured my favorite thing ever: Spirograph. I literally spent hours with this toy. They don’t make it anymore, so I had to log on to eBay to find one. The irony of having to use technology to go retro was not lost on me.

I was like a kid on Christmas when it came. I sat my daughter down at the table and started showing her how to use it. Well, OK, to be honest, I wasn’t really showing her anything. I was grabbing all the pieces and saying “see, look, isn’t this cool, it has gears and there’s a GREEN pen, look at that!” When I finally handed it over, I didn’t recognize my own child.

She sat at that table for over an hour meticulously pinning the gear rings to the backboard, choosing the wheels and following the instructions on how to make different swirled pictures. Nothing on Spirograph beeps, talks, or lights up. Instead of being lulled into a stupor by a dose of video Valium, she was engaged and focused. Not by a screen, but by a tray of plastic, a piece of cardboard and a pen with green ink.

I was asking a friend my age what his favorite toy was growing up. For him, GI Joe, Matchbox cars and Legos topped the list. Thankfully Legos are still around. Toys like these require one thing. Imagination. But just for kicks, GI Joe came with an entire footlocker full of deadly weapons. Not for nothing, if a kid asked for something like that now, they’d get a quick trip the school counselor.

My friend spent hours with his faithful soldier staging raids on his sister’s Barbie camper. Ken was no match for GI Joe and his Kung Fu grip. GI Joe had a pretty short attention span however, since once he captured the ridiculously out of proportion Malibu Barbie, he moved on to digging foxholes in the yard and parachuting off the stair railing to the living room.

The possibilities with these toys are endless. A Matchbox car repair shop with a hand-crank lift becomes pit row at Daytona. A bucket of plastic bricks becomes a walled city, under attack from miniature armies with yellow heads and hooks for hands. And a child becomes anything they want. Batteries not required.

I’m not swearing off tech toys in our house. No way. I want to fire up the Wii now and then and kick my kids’ butts in bowling. I like the wireless remote control helicopters that we fly around the house. But I want my kids to do more than press a button to throw a virtual ball. I want them to make up wild adventures for Barbie, GI Joe and all their friends.

The movie Toy Story was hugely successful in part because every kid has wondered what the toys do when no one is looking. Buzz and Woody came to life just the way our dolls and robots did when we acted out our dreams. That’s what I have learned about toy shopping. You can buy the action figures, the trucks and cars. What you can’t buy, but is essential to childhood, is the joy that happens from making engine noises and shrieking “weeeooooooh, weeeeeeoooooh” while pushing a Matchbox police car across the floor. A child who can do that is going places.