Posts tagged toys

. . . about certain toys.  Certain toys seem to multiply over night.  I’m not sure exactly how this happens, but I know it must be true.  I just wish there was some way that I could prove it.  We all know that when us humans go to sleep at night or when we’re not looking, all of our kids toys come out to play, right?  I’m sure you’ve seen Toy Story.  So I am not sure what they happen to be doing in our house, but they seem to multiply, and I don’t want to know how!

This problem exists specifically with two types of toys in our house.  The miniature figurines and stuffed animals.  I really have no idea where all of these things come from because I know that I don’t buy them.  They’re not the type of toys that I tend to buy for my kids.  These are the types of toys that make their way into your home via a kids meal or a cereal box or as a souvenir gift from a well meaning relative.  So if we rarely eat fast food, don’t buy kids cereal and don’t have many traveling family member, how do we end up with all of this stuff?!

You may think that I’m overreacting a bit here about just how many of these toys we have.  So let me provide you with a visual.  Here you have Exhibit A – the miniature figurines:

This box contains Disney movie characters, Dora characters, a full set of 12 miniature horses, a collection of animals from Australia, the full cast of Little Einsteins, a few kids meal toys and a partridge in a pear tree!  I have no idea where all of these things came from.  I can remember buying maybe one or two of them, but there has got to be at least 100 pieces in this box.  These figurines don’t get played with all that much.  But when they do they usually end up in little parades all around the house which look something like this:

Now I must admit, the little characters aren’t that big of a problem because for the most part they can be crammed into a reasonable size box and stored until it’s time for another parade.  The bigger toy problem that we have in our house is with stuffed animals.  Don’t get me wrong, I was definitely know to have my share of them.  Even in high school and college (ok and even beyond that) I had many that I loved and would put on my bed after it was made (but I never have time to make my bed anymore).  I had stuffed dalmatians, a Winnie the Pooh and a few Care Bears.  Some of these have been taken over by my daughter and were added to her already large collection.  The reason that stuffed animals are such a problem is because they’re big and bulky.  Where did they all come from you might ask?  Well, I blame a few places for our overabundance of these fluff filled critters: parades, fairs and Kohl’s department store (you know, the Kohl’s Cares for Kids $5 stuffed animals that they place right next to the cash registers and your kid begs for as you are on the way through the check out?).

Anyway, there is just no easy way to clean them up and make them look neat.  Right now we have them stuffed into a toy box.  I took everything else out of the toy box so I could hide the stuffed friends in there.  Out of sight, out of mind right?  I give you Exhibit B:

The toy box has become so stuffed that the lid barely closes anymore, yet there are still stuffed animals all over the house.  Last weekend I started packing up some of the toys to get ready for our move and the only reasonable way we could think of to “pack” the stuffed animals was to pile them all into a huge trash bag.  There are two possible things that can happen with this trash bag, 1) it’s lucky and makes it’s way to our new house, or 2) it somehow finds it’s way into the dumpster.  Can you guess which one I’d choose?