The other day, I met up with an acquaintance named Miss A. After a light meal, she suggested popping by Toys R Us as she needed to get some stuff.
That mega toy shop isn’t a place I frequent. Not when I was without kids. Not when I had only one kid. And definitely not now, when I have two kids, aged eight and two.
Why do I deprive my kids of toys, you ask?
Ha! You’re not the only one wondering about that – my mum, father, in-laws, friends and even my husband accuse me of being a scrooge when it comes to buying toys for my kids. It’s not that I loathe toys, really. I think Barbie looks absolutely stunning in that décolleté, but she should really stay in the glass cabinet. I like, well, to look at toys but just not buy them, especially for my kids.
When I was a kid, my family and I stayed in a house with a huge compound. After school, my cousins and I would run around in circles till someone threw up or when one of the adults shouted that it was dinnertime. This was in the late 80s, when it was still safe to cycle to the house down the street to watch Dungeons and Dragons with friends on the television. Those were the sweet childhood days of mine. We survived with very little toys and yet, we remained happy. Blissful indeed.
Back to Toys R Us, Miss A had casually popped four wands, four dolls, four everything into the shopping cart. I had no recollection that she had given birth to quadruplets, so I just had to ask. It turns out that she had invited three other girls to her place for a very serious playdate with her daughter. All the items in the shopping cart had to be identical because, at the age of four, the girls weren’t at a stage where they’ve mastered the art of sharing.
If, at that moment, I had been drinking my usual decaf, it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, with coffee spewing out from my choking self.
What ever happened to having playdates so that the child can learn to socialise, share, fight, lose, cry, console and empathise?
I don’t mind toys – just not battery operated ones
My kids, Gooly and Lolly, have playdates, but I try to make it as casual as possible. They go to the park. They use whatever imagination they can squeeze from their brains. iPads? Sure, we have two at home, but they are locked in the imaginary attic, with a portal that sometimes even I forget how to get into. That’s how obsolete electronic gadgets are in our household.
Yes, my house doesn’t look like an annex to Toys R Us. If I can help it, I’d like that the little toys that we have to be non-battery operated. The repeated sounds of ka-ching and phonics from swords and frogs can really twist my innards into a big mess.
Every morning, my little Lolly puts on her tutu and sits with me to read a book. She has a stick that we picked up from the park and she uses that as a wand. Sometimes she turns it the other way round and waves it around like a sword fighting off “jombies” (by then, she would have donned on her pretend wings to be a pixie or something). I’m so not afraid of a zombie apocalypse with my daughter around.
She also builds wooden blocks. There’s a high building with a community pool, where only white ducks are allowed to swim in it.
She has three sheep as her friends, which I cannot see. She pulls them around on leashes. I’ve always thought they were cute, soft cuddly white ones, but it turns out that one of them is actually black. And the black sheep is a black sheep. Always running away or fighting with the others.
No way will the iPads or Barbies or any toy that emit sounds grant her the vocabulary that she has now. If I had bought her all the toys that she wanted, she would be the little girl in that group who plays but not learn to become a better person.
Just today, she found some ‘treasures’ in a box, which was really a shoebox. When we opened it together, she let out a loud gasp. She clasped her tiny hands and handed the ‘treasure’ to me. It was a rainbow, she claimed.
For me.
I held it near my heart. My face broke into a smile. I must be the best toy to my little girl. I so earned the rainbow.
Toys. Bah! Who needs ‘em. Especially those battery operated ones.
–
Kiki Quah is a mother of two. ‘Thinking aloud allowed’ is invisibly tattooed on her forehead. Goolypop and Lollypop are her spleen, heart, headache and thus will be mentioned as such sporadically throughout her writing getaways.
