Toys schmoys

I joined our local council run toy library this week – what a fabulous idea! Bet it was a female councillor who thought up that one. I picked up a great action-packed bells and whistles activity thingy with lights and sound and movable bits, and a plastic ball because all the books say babies MUST HAVE BALLS to practice hand eye coordination, and to learn cause and affect (ball rolls away, mother runs around looking for it), and to encourage crawling, and generally to keep the world turning on its axis.

However, Anna finds the ball soooooooo boring (if she's anything like me, she'll find that growing up in sports-obsessed Australia can be a real drag sometimes. At least she won't have a little brother whose weekly soccer matches she will be forced to attend owing to it being illegal to leave her at home with a book where she'd prefer to be). She liked the telephone handset attachment on the bells and whistles jobby because she could smash it with gusto, until she smashed herself in the scone with it; then it suddenly became a tool of the devil, never to be touched.

The moral of this story is: don't spend a fortune buying toys 'cos they won't get your money's worth from them. Its been said a thousand times before how much kids prefer playing with the boxes, but apparently us parents need to hear it a thousand times again because we either keep spending a squillion bucks on plastic things made in sweatshops, or we feel bad that we are somehow depriving our children because we can't afford to spend a squillion bucks on plastic things made in sweatshops.

Here are some of Anna's favourite things to play with, in no particular order:

My purse
The dog's lead
The dog
A black plastic lid from the jar in which I keep cotton balls
My mobile phone
Me
Target and Big W catalogues that thoughtfully arrive in our mailbox every week
My glasses
A cardboard box that once had tea in it
The lemon tree

There is a lesson to be learnt here, I just wish I wasn't too tired to get it.