What a fine toy bin of good ideas! Helpful especially for my wife and me (both retired) when we consider gifts for families with children.
I'm sure we struggled with such issues when we were raising our daughter, but mostly I remember her playing outdoors and with every kind of live animal she could lay her hands on. For a while, she had a knack for lizards and snakes. Caught them all over the neighborhood. She was five when I first took her to a reptile shop.
She held and petted and relished every single one of those critters, including big hairy spiders. I'm afraid of snakes, and she chased me around the shop with a colorful little corn snake. There was an eight-foot python in one enclosure, and our daughter talked the staff into bringing it out. They handled it very professionally, very gingerly around our little girl, until she asked if they had ever heard of Steve Irwin. They didn't recognize the Crocodile Hunter's name.
"No, we've never heard of him."
"Well, he doesn't pick up pythons like that. He picks them up like this." Whereupon she grabbed the python in the middle and hoisted it over her head. From that moment on, she and the reptile shop staff were the best of friends.
Soon enough, we had dogs; and not long after, our daughter was riding and training horses. Indoor toys were more for rainy days. Sleepovers for dressing up.
We failed the Barbie test though. The beagles helped to manage it, however. They ate Barbie clothes. I don't know why, but they just gobbled them up. You can guess where the clothes showed up next. I just mowed over them. Barbie mulch .
Not much of a comment I guess. Got a little sidetracked. But I do like everything you wrote here!
I enjoyed reading about your strategy in the Toy Wars: my wife did much of the same for our two kids, with far too little help from me.
What was/is your take on Santa Clause? That's what Christmas meant to me for my first eleven years, despite being in a thoroughly churched Catholic household, and I read the Little Flower's biography and noted her own dismay at reaching eleven when her father pronounced that the last year for their version of it.
What a fine toy bin of good ideas! Helpful especially for my wife and me (both retired) when we consider gifts for families with children.
I'm sure we struggled with such issues when we were raising our daughter, but mostly I remember her playing outdoors and with every kind of live animal she could lay her hands on. For a while, she had a knack for lizards and snakes. Caught them all over the neighborhood. She was five when I first took her to a reptile shop.
She held and petted and relished every single one of those critters, including big hairy spiders. I'm afraid of snakes, and she chased me around the shop with a colorful little corn snake. There was an eight-foot python in one enclosure, and our daughter talked the staff into bringing it out. They handled it very professionally, very gingerly around our little girl, until she asked if they had ever heard of Steve Irwin. They didn't recognize the Crocodile Hunter's name.
"No, we've never heard of him."
"Well, he doesn't pick up pythons like that. He picks them up like this." Whereupon she grabbed the python in the middle and hoisted it over her head. From that moment on, she and the reptile shop staff were the best of friends.
Soon enough, we had dogs; and not long after, our daughter was riding and training horses. Indoor toys were more for rainy days. Sleepovers for dressing up.
We failed the Barbie test though. The beagles helped to manage it, however. They ate Barbie clothes. I don't know why, but they just gobbled them up. You can guess where the clothes showed up next. I just mowed over them. Barbie mulch .
Not much of a comment I guess. Got a little sidetracked. But I do like everything you wrote here!
I enjoyed reading about your strategy in the Toy Wars: my wife did much of the same for our two kids, with far too little help from me.
What was/is your take on Santa Clause? That's what Christmas meant to me for my first eleven years, despite being in a thoroughly churched Catholic household, and I read the Little Flower's biography and noted her own dismay at reaching eleven when her father pronounced that the last year for their version of it.
God Bless.
Great question, Bryan! I wrote an article to answer it. Hope you don't mind.
https://open.substack.com/pub/reginadoman/p/catechizing-with-christmas?r=193ba0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true