Toys and Games

i was thinking the other day about the games and toys i had as a kid. tried to picture our kids playing with what i had and wondering if they would have liked them more or less than what they have now. granted, i grew up with a brother and no sisters. we have one son and two daughters so their toys are a little different.

our son has lots and lots of legos. so did we. i remember we used to keep ours in an old dutch holland bulb box. my brother and i would make cars, trucks, spaceships. we seemingly never had that one piece we needed to finish our masterpiece, but we perservered and got it done through improvisation. now our son has more than he knows what to do with. we don't dare get them all out or we'd have a huge mess on the floor. he likes to build planes, trucks, fire trucks, and smash them in to everything else. my brother comes over on occasion and calls it his "creative release" to play with legos. time to wind down and have fun playing with toys.

we had an atari. it was neat having the coolest games like missle command, asteroids, pacman, pitfall, or whatever we had. then we got a nintendo and it was even neater. used to have mortal combat with the computer generated blood when my character kicked the crap outta the other guy. now there's wii, which we have. it's funny to watch our son, and now our oldest daughter who's almost 4, play boxing and punch the other guy. she actually won a week or so ago. she got so tired she sat down while she was boxing. the kids like beating and banging on my rock band instruments. i like that game because of the music.

my brother had an erector set. i never did. i'd play with his. i think they're still around. there was one game i used to love playing with in 2nd grade during inside recess. it was nothing more than plastic sticks and plastic panels for making a building. i could make it tall, wide, whatever. it was actually kind of neat. haven't seen that for many, many years.

i can remember at one of my grandmother's house that she had a bunch of marbles. big ones, small ones, shooters, clear ones, colored ones. they all looked neat and i always chose the coolest looking ones. i think now that if any of our kids had a bunch of marbles that they'd end up being flung in to walls, or at the dog, or at each other.

we had our bikes, skateboards, and slinky. i had tons and tons of hotwheels. son has a lot of hotwheels and he loves playing with them. i have about 100 or so in the attic still in the package i bought them in. not sure if i'm going to hang on to them and sell them later or give them to him when he gets older.

a couple years ago we started buying the geotrax trains for our son. i had an ho scale train when i was a kid. a little different but the geotrax trains are neat. a lot easier to construct, destruct, change, add to, and play with. one year i spent a couple hours assembling all the pieces (4 trains in all) in the garage. very time consuming but it was fun. one of our uncles had a cool train in his basement. his locomotive could be loaded with smoke pellets to make it look like it was belching out smoke as it was running. that was the neatest train. i used to love going to the children's museum here and seeing all the trains they had set up. it was always a neat trip to see what had changed in their setup. talk about a neat job setting and running all those trains.

the girls have their dolls. one's all about dora, the other about barbie and princess stuff. they both have their dogs and cats they carry around and the world "ends" when they can't be found. same goes for our son. he has his puppies he takes with him. he used to keep one in his backpack he'd take to school with him. it's funny to look through his backpack at the end of a school week just to see what sort of things he carries in there. a pencil or two, notes he's written, a piece of candy, a stuffed animal, a tape measure, a "special" pen or marker, piece of yarn, things like that. i'm sure they have all have sentimental value attached to them and that's why he carries them. i'm sure i used to do the same thing when i was his age.

now our son has our desktop pc in his room. he likes playing games on there. he'll find games at sites i've never heard of. he plays war games, math games, shoot 'em up games, whatever. he also likes watching music videos which is kind of fun to see what he likes. never had a pc when i was a kid. i was 19 or so when i got my first one, a hand-me-down gateway. he has computer lessons at school. i saw my first pc in 6th grade and all we got to do was make starfields or make our names flash and go across the screen. it was a big deal to see those big tandy computers. we even had a computer club back then. man, how things have changed!

toys are toys. i like giving the toys-r-us ads to the kids on the weekends so they can see what they'd like. i usually get a, "daddy, i want that one" after they've looked at it for about 30 seconds. trust me, our kids have more toys in more toy boxes than my brother and i ever did. on occasion some of them will mysteriously disappear to make room for new toys.

give it a year and their tastes will change and we'll have a new batch of toys and games for them to pay with. who knows? i may even find something else from when i was a kid and they may actually like it.