You know, before my daughter was born, I was a good money manager. "Redecorate the nursery? Of course I will - just as soon as my baby is able to choose the colour scheme herself". "Baby clothes? Whatever for? It's summer and the baby can crawl around in her nappy. But all right, two sets then: one in the wash, one on the baby." And my very favourite, the one that has come back to haunt me over and over: "Toys? No way. Give them a wooden plate and a wooden spoon, the way they did it in my grandmother's days. Hours of fun."
My resolve was firm when it came to buying the cot (sensible wood, unpainted) and bed linen (sensible white that can be bleached - everything else looked too gaudy and sickly-sweet). The resolve wavered a little when I saw a video about baby development. The expert seemed to imply that every baby needed at least one whole shopful of toys in order to learn to cope with this big bad world. Rattles for distinguishing the direction of sound, posters with black and white patterns to train the sense of sight, texture like sheepskin and silk to roll on naked sans nappy in order to improve. I forget what.
So there was the video on the one hand, fervently supported by every manufacturer of educational toys (rattles whose rings move, cot bumpers with the alphabet painted in friendly do-not-panic colours, cuddly caterpillars that vibrate, bears that moo when bashed and books one can chew as well as smell). On the other hand was my rational belief that too many toys mess up a child's imagination.
Which is why I was more than a little confused when I arrived at post-natal care with my freshly baked bunny daughter. All the other mothers had psychedelic bees the size of dragons or musical blankets attached to their portable baby car seats, while I carried my child in my arms, my bewildered face her only visual entertainment.
Naturally, I was not going to be outdone. Long before I felt brave enough to take on a shopping mall with the baby, she had already acquired smiley faces for her bassinet (home made), a wide range of rattles (small cardboard boxes filled with rice and dry pasta) and my silk scarf to pee on. My daughter yelled with terror when she spotted her toys, but hey, the manufacturing process had been fun.
But wait, there's more. Weeks passed and I ventured outside. A shop which until recently I would refer to vaguely as selling "boring baby stuff" was suddenly like Aladdin's cave. I coveted socks with mirrors sewn onto them, I couldn't live without colourful concentric rings on pegs, finger puppets, musical mobiles and cuddly octopuses. And I knew for certain that my daughter's motor development would be irreversibly hindered without a beach ball and soap bubbles.
"What have you in there?" inquired my husband when I arrived home with a shopping bag the size of our bathtub, having gone out two hours before to purchase a single baby spoon.
I gave him a helpless look. "It's just that she seems bored with her current bath toys," I said. "So I bought her some new ones."
"Excellent," I heard. "We can use the cardboard boxes to make new rattles. And the plastic bag will make a good crackle-snake if we stuff it into a stocking."
And therein lies the crux of the matter. Children don't have concentration spans. They get bored with their brand new toys almost before you've managed to convert the toy's packing box into another toy.
"Hours of fun" it says on the box of every new toy I bought. That's just Marketspeak. Like Jumbo eggs or Extra Large popcorn. They don't mean "hours and hours of fun". They mean "only hours, of fun. like one hour perhaps. broken over the years into 30 2-minute intervals".
Oh, and the marketers don't mean the toy when they say "hours of fun", anyway. They mean the box.
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