Playdoh: a genius classic, or designed to torture parents?
I've just realised that writing the title 'gifts and trinkets for children THAT suck' could have been a little more ambiguous.
Good thing I checked myself before I wrecked myself.
So enough time has now passed since Christmas for me to draw some strong, lucid conclusions as to which children's gifts are actually more of a curse.
Now before I go any further, do not mistake this for being a blog about toys that are unsafe for children, or that children do not like. Oh no, these feelings of anguish concern themselves only with The Chief Put-Away-er, or floor scrubber, or whomever. In this case that would mostly be me. Indeed you will see many toys below which Son positively raves about; I just like to think that he only gets to haul them out with my approval.
Except when I'm really tired.
Or it's a really rainy day.
Anyway...
1) Play Doh
Read: Play D'oh.
Yes, like I said, this list may contain children's 'classics' and this item is no exception. Son loves to get his box off the shelf and take out all the little tubs of this stuff, squawking in frustration as he needs me to actually squeeze it out of said tubs. Now I have to say, playing with it does occupy him for quite some time which, as we know, is No Small Thing. He has a machine where you put it in one end and it splurges out the other; he has little plastic mould- cases where you shove the playdoh in and, upon reopening, take out a cool dinosaur or superhero shape. I can see the attraction.
This is all well and good but it's just the goddam mess. I know, I know, toddlers make mess, but this is some next-level shit. Forget the fact that its colour integrity has vanished upon very first use since it soon becomes a murky, hodge-podge ball of primary hues. It's that upon trying to tidy this stuff away, you are faced with one or any combination of the following:
All over the table, or more likely, your floor: the little poos of mice on acid, i.e. tiny roll-y bits of rainbow pastry that defy being picked up by adult fingers. In fact, nimble toddler fingers are ideal for this task yet strangely Son seems to disagree.
Indeed if they are not picked up immediately: hard old mouse droppings which are of no use ever again, OR
Little flattened discs that have been trodden upon and that you have to scrape off the floor with a knife. Even if you succeed in this part, some dull shape forever remains to mock you where the play doh has been, with the ridges of said knife still in it if you're lucky. OR...
Worse still, wodges that have been trodden into your carpet, flattened forever like chewing gum into your shag.
This concludes my discussion of playdoh.
2) Most children's fridge magnets. Again, Son delights in faffing about with these animals, numbers, letters. However my issue with them is twofold:
- They often fall off the fridge and end up kicked underneath, gathering fur and grease until the next decade when the fridge gets moved. Now you could say that this happens to ANY fridge magnets, however:
- Kids' magnets are pathetic as magnets. This is my chief complaint. If they're going to sit on the fridge door, they can at least prop up my electrician's phone number, a postcard or, more sweetly, Son's finger paintings. But they cannot hold up jack and fall down if you even try to put a piece of loo paper between them and the metal surface. Thus begins the fate that I mentioned above. Useless.
3) Most noisy children's toys. Particularly ones with tunes. If you have ever bought one of these for a child, it is very likely that you do not have children. Be aware that upon reception of such an item, most parents immediately reach for the miniature phillips screwdriver they got from a cracker and set about removing the batteries.
** Now I may have misled you slightly into believing that I have never bought any such gifts for children. Logical though this may be, it is untrue. I believe I have bought all of the above on various occasions, I just seem to think how awesome a gift they'd be for the child and forget about the parent. This may be the point of buying children's gifts, I hear you cry, but do not forget that on tricky days when Son is being less than compliant, it is the parents' friendship / tea / wine / tequila I will need.
However, in my stupid quest to be a Great Host-Mum at my son's birthday party, I am as likely as anyone to shove the following into party bags that took me about eight hours to prepare:
4) Whistles. Read the above on noisy toys.
5) Tiny tubs of playdoh. Nuff said. OR chalk or crayons for decorating Farrow and Ball walls.
6) Cheap chocolates that make dog chocs taste like Lindt. Well, the e-number high and crash is not something the host will have to deal with, so that's all good.
7) Large bubble-dips, you know, the long, thin ones with fairy liquid in where the kids blow the bubbles out through the weird oval ring. Except a) Not only does your toddler yelp with anger at not being able to do this and thus force you to do it, b) they insist upon doing this inside and c) upon any hard floor, they manage to spill the solution so that it forms slippery blobs for you to slide about on, like invisible banana skins.
Ideally, next Christmas / birthday party we would never see any of these things again. But let's face it, perhaps among us parents there is an element of schadenfreude to all gift/trinket-buying and I'll treat the above more like a handy shopping list.
Erica
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