Lego or Playmobil?

I know.

It's one of those great questions of the 21st century, isn't it?  Up there with Are those bones Richard III's?  (very excited to find out they are, by the way), How can we solve third world debt? and What on earth is quantitative easing, anyway?

Playmobil or lego?

What do you think?

Two weekends ago we went to stay with some friends.  They had a big selection of duplo:  houses, hospitals, police stations and the like, and L absolutely loved it.  Not the construction element of it, but the playing imaginatively, creating tiny worlds.

It's her sixth birthday in three months time and as she is completely obsessed by planning it, I am becoming so too, and this weekend rather inspired me on the present front.

But at six she's clearly too old for duplo.

So should it be lego - on the basis that you get imaginative play and the inspirational foundations of a glittering career as a celebrity architect (maybe) - and if so, which bit of branding? How much do we hate lego friends a year or so after its launch, or is it not as bad as all that?  Or if we shy away from that and the movie tie-ins is there anything in the lego city that isn't fuelled entirely by speed and agression?

Or do we go with tried and tested, hasn't changed in thirty years (still can't walk) playmobil:  no construction, but a world of different sets to play with, each of which more reflects how she was playing with the duplo?  Even though it's, somehow, not quite as cool as lego. 

Or is that just me? 


And while you're at it, should they all have had capital letters?

When friends grow old.

Barely days ago, in Summer 2010, I posted this picture of A's best friend:

Bunny:

In the intervening two and a half years, Bunny has been much loved, much played with. Much cuddled and nurtured.

So much so, that this is Bunny now, scrubbed up and looking at his best for the photo:

Bunny is still loved.  Still taken to bed every night. Still clutched through bumps and bruises, fears and frolics, dreams and nightmares.  Still sucked and nuzzled into a disgusting, soggy, stinky rag that requires a weekly 90 degree wash.


But we have to accept that the end cannot be far off.  And I don't know how I am going to cope, much less A.

The Gallery - Playtime

How bad is my timing?

I published a post yesterday with some (not particularly fantastic) pictures I love of S and A playing together, co-operating and sharing as I hope they will throughout their lives.

And then I thought "Oh, it's the Gallery tomorrow. I wonder what it is?  I'd better get my post ready."

And of course it's Playtime.  So I could just head back to that post, or tweak it and republish it, or something, but that feels like a cop-out (although do go and have a look, the pictures are lovely - or I think so, but then I'm their mother) so I'm not going to do that.

Or I'm sort of not.  Here's another one of the pictures anyway, just for the fun of it:

Isn't that amazing? They're 19 months old, and they're sharing, co-operating, playing together.  I think that's a twin thing, because I'm pretty certain that L wouldn't have played with another child like that at that age.  But, twins or no, that is what I want for all three of them, as they grow up as sisters: to have someone to play with, to share childhood- and, in due course, grown up-experiences with.  And when they fight, as they increasingly are doing (there's another post in there I suspect), I just have to sit back and remind myself that they can be like this too...

So anyway, given that that isn't my Gallery entry for this week, here's one of L too because otherwise she doesn't feature at all, and she does, after all, do her fair share of the playing in this house: 

She doesn't look like she's playing, but she is and I love that.  It forces me to remember that even when they are lolling on our tummies on a Northumberland beach, squishing sand between their fingers, they are still playing, and that although I beat myself up about not playing with them enough; about not cutting up enough bits of sticky back plastic, or making up enough stories, or using enough jumpers for enough goalposts, sitting with my children and watching the sand form little piles between their toes is playing too, and, in its own way, just as valuable.

Twenty minutes of co-operation (featuring a review)

One of the things I'm really enjoying about S and A at the moment is watching them interract.  It's not always good interraction: the journey to my parents' last week (while, please note, they should, in any event, have been asleep) was spent with one of them putting her hand on the other's car seat, and the other going ballistic at the encroachment on her territory.  A brief bout of arm wrestling would ensue, before the roles were reversed. 

Would have been funny if it hadn't been so noisy.  Actually, scratch that, it was funny...  Today's behaviour, on the other hand, was less so...

But, for better or worse, they're very into doing things together at the moment, and, mostly, it's lovely to see.

I was watching them, the other day, with a Stacking Tree which I had been sent by Hello Baby Direct.  Now, I didn't know this website before, and there are bits of it (well one bit of it) that I think is awful.  It describes itself as "the website for parents who care", which is the sort of thing that is absolutely guaranteed to make me angry.  It implies that if you don't buy things from their website, then you don't care, and quite frankly parents are given enough to beat themselves up about already without online toy shops getting in on the action.  It's exactly the same when you're expecting a baby ("well, you could get the cheaper car seat (which, please note, meets all safety standards), but, really, for the baby's sake..." (sub-text: "if you really loved your baby...").

So, had I happened upon the website, I'd have sworn at the computer and clicked away.  As it is, they sent me something nice, so I had to have a proper look, and I'm glad I did, because not only have they got some really nice stuff, but they actually realise that parents care about more than just their own child.  So they give you the background on the manufacturers and processes that go into the making of the toys, so that you can make decisions based on that too.

Anyway, back to the toy and the babies.

They showed each other what to do:

 

They took it in turns:

 

And they cheered and clapped each other when they (jointly) got it right:

And, most importantly, they spent a good twenty minutes playing together without so much as a push or a whinge.

So thank you Hello Baby, and thank you Stacking Tree.  You made my month.  I'll be getting it out again tomorrow after the day I've had....

Confessions of a PlayDoh fascist

I love PlayDoh.

I love the yellow pots, with their coloured lids. I love the way it squishes, and squeezes.  I love the softness of it, and the malleability of it.  I even love the slightly odd smell of it.

But most of all, I love the colours.  I love the brightness, the clarity, the range.

Which is why I am a PlayDoh fascist.

Because, let's face it, your average 3-year (or indeed 19-month) old child just doesn't get it. Give them some PlayDoh and what do they do?  They squish it.  They mush it.  They roll it around and have fun with it (damn them) and you end up with a pile of sludge-coloured goo.

And I hate sludge-coloured goo almost as much as I love PlayDoh.

Which is why, I am afraid, I am unconvinced by the PlayDoh Fun Factory they so kindly sent me a while back.

Let's get one thing straight of course.  The girls loved it, especially L.  (S and A weren't so keen, but then they haven't yet quite worked out that PlayDoh isn't for eating, and so tended to get cross when I took the PlayDoh off them to put in the factory.)  It's basically a big PlayDoh press with a dial on the front with lots of different shaped holes in it, so that you can make lots of differently shaped tubes of PlayDoh.

Like this:

It comes with a red tub and a blue tub of PlayDoh, which tuck neatly away inside it along with a spatula for scraping and cutting and poking in your sister's eye (which may not be exactly what they designed it for).

The problem?  It's got lots of little nooks and crannies, where the spatula can't reach, and so however hard you (for which read "I" try) bits of blue stick and then bits of red, and then all the rest of the colours you've found in the back of the cupboard and want to play with too because it's so much fun and before you know it you're back at the sludge-coloured goo stage...

So, anyway, the verdict on the PlayDoh Fun Factory?  Great for kids.  Rubbish for fascists.

Scandal in the toy box

The Fisher Price Mummy went missing a number of months ago. Since then the Daddy and the baby have been getting along very nicely thank you. But now Mr Noah too is nowhere to be found. Mrs Noah is putting on a brave face, but I can see she has her suspicions...

Where on earth do they go? I have checked everywhere, including turning out the bins. It's clearly the parental version of the missing sock in the washing machine.  And just as irritating.