The Blog of Brian Hodges

Allison has been going to Vacation Bible School this summer where she’s been learning all about Jesus.  In these two clips she explains to dear old dad the story of The Passion and the story of Jesus healing the paralytic.  I know I’m biased, but I think it’s freakin’ adorable.  Take a listen and I think you will too:

The Passion… according to Allison

Healing the Sick… according to Allison

Ask anyone with a four- to ten-year-old and they’ll tell you: Knock-Knock jokes are the bane of a parent’s existence.  I’ll take the three-year-old “why why why” phase any day over the Knock-Knock phase.

It’s not just that Knock-Knock jokes are inherently unfunny.  But because the setup is so dang simple, kids feel like it gives them free license to write their own material.  Which is basically the equivalent of somebody reading Harry Potter and thinking, “Hey, I like to read.  I could be a novelist.”  Or my personal favorite, a woman who told my wife that she could be a midwife because she watches A Baby Story every day.  So Allison will frequently come out with such gems as:

Knock-Knock.
Who’s there?
DVD.
DVD who?
DVD like the movies!

Knock-Knock
Who’s there?
The couch.
The couch who?
The couch that you sit on to watch TV!  Ha ha ha ha!

As a parent this really is a no win situation.  By laughing I encourage her to keep making lame attempts at humor.  By not laughing, I of course destroy every shred of her self-esteem and scar her for life, right?

On the other hand, the fact that they find such disproportionate levels of humor in something so insanely stupid can, in fact, make a parent’s job easier.  For the last two years I have been able to make both my kids laugh without fail using this very simple formula:

Q: What did (x) say to (y)?
A: You’re so silly because you’re a (y) and I’m an (x)!

Mind you, the punchline is always delivered in a frantic almost stuttering manner and punctuated with a heartfelt “Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!”  But the effect is always the same: both my kids laughing hysterically at what essentially amounts to restating a question with the question itself.  Hopefully I’m not raising them to be TV pundits.

Q: What did Barack Obama say to the deficit?
A: Y-y-y-you’re so silly because because because you’re the deficit and and and and and and and I’m Barack Obama! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Roll your eyes all you want, but this little technique has come in quite handy on many a JC Penney portrait days after said children have been cooped up inside a car for an hour and then forced to sit in a chair and smile during what should be their nap time.

But as much as I pretend-complain here, the fact is I really do bring it on myself.  I recently introduced the Chicken Joke and its one truly funny manifestation to Allison:

Q: Why did the frog cross the road?
A: Because it was stapled to the chicken.

Now she simply substitutes any animal or inanimate object for “frog” and tells it like it’s a brand new and utterly freakin hi-larious joke.  And okay, the way she cracks up every single time is kind of adorable as hell.

We’re T-minus any day now for kid number three (boy number two), so I figure it’s about time to get this dormant blog fired up again with all those random musings about childhood, parenthood and randomhood that all three of you faithful readers have come to expect.  So without further ado:

RANDOM PARENTAL MUSINGS AS OF LATE:

Bibbity bobbity BOOM

I was watching Star Wars with Allison the other day.  Upon watching the Death Star obliterate Alderaan, she turns to me and says: “Where is the Princess going to live now?  I guess she’ll just have to marry someone with a house.”  I, of course, blame Disney.

Jesse is two and a half and has taken to playing with his penis pretty much non-stop.  I don’t want to necessarily scold him and lay the foundation for weird sexual hang-ups later in life (that’s what walking in on mommy and daddy mid-coitus is for).  On the other hand, with the way he yanks on that thing, and the fact that I can’t personally attest to the tactile strength and elasticity of foreskin, I don’t want him to, ya know, break anything… which, I imagine would affect his future sex life even more.  That’s why the phrase, “Only in your crib,” is uttered an estimated three hundred times per day in our house.  Because the fact is, he’s probably fine.  I just don’t want to see it.  This is why this standup bit is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in months.  And as a side-but-related-note… even though I don’t doubt our decision not to circumcise, I just have to say: foreskins are freakin’ WEIRD.

Allison and I have been reading chapter books before bed.  We recently started “Ramona the Pest” which I thought would be great since Ramona, like Allison, is starting kindergarten.  Yeah, then on her first day she gets into trouble like five times and has at least three kids making fun of her.  Allison was psyched about kindergarten, but then you have jerks like Beverly Cleary making her ask, “Why was Ramona sad on her first day of school?”

I have not pooped by myself in about four months, which is coincidentally about how long it’s been since Jesse learned how to open doors.  I don’t know why he insists on joining me while I drop a load, but I’ve lost the will to fight him anymore.  Now I simply have fun with it. Like sticking my foot out so that Jesse, running at full speed and expecting the door to open all the way, plows into it head first.

Whereas we had all our girl names picked out a good three months before we were even engaged, Lauren and I have really had to struggle to eke out a boy’s name, preferably at least a couple days before they’re born.  We’ve been settled on Max for several months now.  At least I thought we were until the other night when Lauren announces that she’s freaked out about what we’ll name him if he comes out with red hair.  “Max just always struck me as a dark haired name,” she says.  In case you didn’t already know, both our kids have red hair, I have red hair, Lauren’s sister and grandmother have red hair, my entire paternal side of the family has red hair.  Recessive genes be damned, if we don’t have a redhead, I’ll be pretty freakin surprised… after which I’ll apparently be one of those parents who, in fact, did not pick out their kid’s name ahead of time.

I’ve discovered that no matter how cranky Jesse gets, or how hopped up on adrenaline he becomes, I can pretty much diffuse the situation and make him laugh by hurling a pillow full speed at his head.

I find having Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the door actually provides a good opportunity for discussing world cultures with a five-year-old and explaining how “some people don’t believe the same things we do.”

In the last couple months Jesse has mustered up the strength to open the refrigerator door.  In the last week he has mustered up the strength to lift and move his step-stool in order to reach the microwave.  Absolutely nothing in our house is safe anymore.

I had my first “there’s no such thing as monsters” talk with Allison before bed the other night.  Hearing her say, “Thanks, Dad,” at the end and then throwing her arms around my neck was, perhaps, the highlight of my entire summer.

Santa gave Jesse a Matchbox car ramp for Christmas.  Few things let me bond with my rambunctious son more than staying up until eleven o’clock on a Friday night, racing these things down the ramp over and over again, and busting a gut every time they crash into each other.

It’s amazing how your kids will just randomly give you new and completely amazing reasons to love them.  And new and amazing examples what unique individuals they are.  The girl received the movie Dumbo for Christmas and has watched it several times since.  But when she asks to watch it, she doesn’t ask to watch Dumbo.  She says, “Can I watch Jumbo Junior.”  Because if you remember the movie, “Jumbo Junior” is what the elephant’s mom originally names him.  It’s only after everyone sees his giant ears that they start calling him “Dumbo.”  It’s meant as a derogatory nickname.  And yet even his best friend, Timothy Mouse calls him that.   That’s like making friends with that fat pie eating kid from Stand By Me and still referring to him as “Lard Ass.”   Okay so you made friends with him, but you’re still killing him a little every time you don’t call him by his real name.  Apparently this never struck anyone in the Dumbo audience as weird.

Well it struck the girl that way.  She understands that even an elephant has feelings and recognizes how blatantly wrong it was to keep referring to Dumbo as Dumbo.  So she has decided to do the right thing and call him by his real name.  And not only that, if one of us forgets and says, “the D word” she will actually correct us.  “Jumbo Junior, dad.”

I seriously love that kid.  She’s only four, but she gets it.  Sometimes I forget how much.

Indy, why does the red background move?

Continuing with the theme of video games from yesterday, the very first eBay purchase I ever made was a used Atari 2600. The year was 1999 and I was twenty-one. And yes, I realize in my previous blog I made it pretty clear just how much of a colossal loser you had to be to play video games post-drivers age. But you don’t understand. I had to buy that Atari. I had to. For one very important reason. I had never beaten Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Before I continue you should realize, if you don’t already know, that video games in the mid-80’s weren’t like the video games of today… or even the video games of the early 90’s for that matter. Most of those games couldn’t actually be beaten. You just kept moving up levels of increasing difficulty until you returned to the first board and began the process all over again. In the world of Atari and Coleco, you pretty much just played until you died… or until the console got sick of you and overheated. It was a lot like life in that respect. So the idea that you could finish Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat positive way inspired you to keep at it. But between me, several of my friends and every one of their older brothers, we were never EVER successful.

That haunted me.

The Nazis' vertical line is too long... they're digging in the wrong dots.

Over the next thirteen years my mind often drifted back to that two-dimensional world of pixilated snakes and dot matrix whips. I had clearly missed something. Something to do with the Map Room screen. I knew that you had to bring a key and a medallion into that screen, just like in the movie, to reveal where the ark lay in a vast mesa field. Selecting the medallion supposedly revealed the ark’s location, but selecting the key was the only way to reveal the map itself. How could you possibly select both items at the same time? Especially when one false step without the proper item could and would make you fall off a cliff and die… and by “die” I mean your “body” would disappear pixel by giant pixel, starting with your rectangular “feet” and ending with your upside-down-T “fedora”. But the more and more I went back, the closer I came to five or six plausible strategies. Unfortunately, I’d gotten rid of my Atari in fifth grade, so I had no way of testing those theories.

God bless the age of the internet. I went onto eBay for the first time in the fall of 1999 and placed a bid on an Atari 2600 with a largish handful of games—including, of course, the much anticipated, and much antagonistic, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I checked back frequently, almost schizophrenically, in the auction’s final moments, then waited two long weeks for my check to clear and my destiny to arrive. The day it did, I could barely focus on work. I ate cereal for dinner, hooked up the Atari, jammed the Raiders cartridge into its slot and said a mini prayer of thanks when it fired up on the first try.

Cue the John Williams in 4-bit sound.

I’m here to tell you right now, folks; the American Dream is a reality. I beat the game in less than thirty minutes. The “victory screen” was minimal—a five-second animation of Indy rising on a spring toward the ark—but few moments, before or since, have ever been so satisfying. I sighed contentedly as I thought, “Okay, now what?”

That was nine years ago and I’ve yet to come up with an adequate answer.

See how it’s done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uKI7J0pdr4

At what point did video games suddenly become cool? When I was a kid you played video games until (and ONLY until) you or one of your friends got a drivers license, at which point you said, “Screw Mario Brothers, I’ve got better things to do.” Personally I always looked forward to the day when I would be deemed officially too old for video games. I never knew which turtle shell to stomp on to get to the secret level, or which bricks you could smash to get ten bazillion lives. I don’t even know how anyone managed to figure that stuff out in those days before the internet. Actually yes I do know how they figured it out. They were geeks! And they had no life! So I was very much looking forward to sixteen, and turning in my paddles for the chance at maybe touching a girl’s boob. Of course that particular dream wouldn’t become a reality until the age of 25 or so, but at least nobody was calling me a “Gamorian” every time I got killed.

But then the language changed. Suddenly anyone who spent twenty bleary-eyed hours a day pushing buttons in their parents’ basement weren’t complete video game nerds. They were… “gamers.” I’m sorry, gamers? Slap an enigmatic title on it and suddenly it’s cool to be lame? Why couldn’t they have done that for the geeky things I was into? Rather than assembling plastic X-wing models in the secrecy of my own room, I could have been… a cementer. Nah, too easy to draw out the “C” and make it sound gay. A gluer? A builder? Exactoist! Crap, some geekery just doesn’t lend itself to badass verbage.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like playing the occasional bout of Mario Kart on my sister-in-law’s Wii as much as the next guy (and I’m sorry, but the fact that the end of this sentence doesn’t make anyone’s eyebrows go up is just plain wrong). But you used to be able to get that kind of fix with five dollars worth of quarters at the local video arcade. And since it was kind of a social situation, indulging that latent geekery provided at least some small probability that you might meet a girl who might let you touch her boob. But unless something goes horribly wrong, there’s no way that is going to happen on my sister-in-law’s Wii (seriously how does that not bug the crap out of everybody???).

Am I wrong? I can’t imagine I’m the only thirty-year-old in America who thinks the ubiquitousness of video games is a bad thing… the only thirty-year-old who looked forward to buying a car for no other reason than he could finally stop memorizing some stupid UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT combination.

I was watching the Dane Cook “Rough Around the Edges” special on Comedy Central the other night (I assure you, there was absolutely nothing else on) and the first thing I want to say is: Dane, buddy, I know you’ve been at this standup thing for a few years, so you should know better by now—when your comedy special airs on basic cable, it might be a good idea to make sure they don’t have to bleep every other word out of your mouth. Kinda makes it hard to appreciate the gentle comedy.

But here’s the good thing about the show: Dane’s opening bit was about a place in New Hampshire called “Benson’s Animal Farm.” Now, for any of you who didn’t grow up in New England, I’m sure that reference is lost completely on you. In fact it might even be lost on some of you who did grow up in the area. Benson’s was my very first amusement park experience. Well, I think “amusement park” is a tad too grandiose a description for the place, which was really little more than a glorified fairgrounds with cheesy midway rides and a sad little zoo thrown in for good measure. But what did I know about quality entertainment when I was all of three years old?

I don’t remember much about that day at Benson’s Animal Farm save for two things. First, I remember thinking (seriously, no joke) that it must have been Robert Guillaume’s day off. But the more important memory—Benson’s was also my very first experience on a roller coaster.

Though again, “roller coaster” is perhaps a wee bit too generous. I mean sure, it was an open-air train on a track that went up an incline and coasted down at an increased rate of speed, except the total distance traveled was little more than three hundred feet at best. The fact that they let me ride it at three-years-old gives you some idea of the G-forces it was pulling. It was intended to be just a bit of low level amusement for kids and their parents, much like the rest of the park. But that didn’t stop me from screaming my head off the entire time.

It wasn’t the speed that got me. I knew perfectly well what I was getting myself into in that arena. And I remember being really excited when I got onto the roller coaster with my mom. We sat right up front so I could see and experience everything. The ride started and we climbed the ramp, crested over the top and started down. And so I started screaming. A happy little scream at first, simply because I knew that’s what you were supposed to do on a roller coaster. But that all changed as we approached the bottom at maximum speed. You see, the builders must have realized just how lame their ride was, and so as an added gag they stuck a mini section of track onto the bottom of the hill which shot out a few feet and abruptly ended. Ha ha funny, it looks like we’re going to fly off the track!

Yeah, I didn’t get the joke. As our car rushed toward the “end” of the line, and the potential end of my life, my innocent little scream turned into pure, unadulterated terror. Holy god, we’re going to die! The train, of course, veered to the side at the last second and we hurtled in a small circle over a couple bumps and around a few curves before coming to rest at the bottom of the incline. I managed to calm down almost immediately, even as the train started back up the hill (the circuit was so stinking short they had to send us around several times just to make it worth the effort of a line). The train crested the hill again and started down. Once again I saw that small chunk of track terminating into thin air and I howled, tears streaming from my eyes, certain I was about to plummet to my death. But at the last second the train swerved and we were safe. By the third, fourth and fifth time around, you’d think I would have picked up on the pattern, if not the humor in it. But at the age of three, I was not what one might call a “logical positivist.” Just because the sun had risen every day since the beginning of time did not mean that I would not die a horrible painful death as hard jagged metal sheered through the soft tissue of my body. So I screamed and cried and screamed some more until the thoroughly evil man finally stopped the ride and let us off. I’m pretty sure I got ice cream out of the ordeal so it wasn’t all bad.

Benson’s closed it’s gates in the mid-80’s and has become something of a mini-ghost town. After watching Dane Cook’s oft-bleeped routine, I’m suddenly rather curious to take a stop back at the old ‘Farm and see if the memories of my first palpable fear of death come shrieking back to me. Jeez, do any of you really wonder that I’m such a neurotic mess?

(from 2005)

Visual stimulation is a crucial learning tool for the developing mind.  You’d think the people at the book and toy companies would understand this concept and respond accordingly.  I always assumed that they put at least a modicum of thought into every illustration or visual representation aimed at babies and toddlers.

Then one day at Babies-R-Us I saw a plastic placemat with a drawing of two kid-sized hands on it, with the thumbs pointed out—not in.  This should have been the kind of illustration that begs a kid to place his own hands inside the shapes to see how they fit, except that no Homo Sapiens’ hands face that way when they’re flat on the table!  Whose turn on the crack pipe was it at the printing company the day they mass-produced these things?

We own bunch of little books that show a single picture and its corresponding word on each page: apple, cat, boots, etc.  It’s fun and easy for a baby like The Girl to appreciate since she’s really only looking at the pictures anyway.  Now, if I were the one making seven dollars an hour to pick out these pictures, knowing that the entire success of this book depended on what I chose, I think I would have been a little more discriminating than these people.

If I were seeking out a picture, say, for the page that says, “cookie”, I would look for the quintessential cookie.  And to me, to any rational person, that can only mean chocolate chip.  Instead, the Queer Eye Martha Stewart lemming over at the book company picked some frou-frou Fancy Lad cookie with jelly in the middle.  To me, it looks like a cherry pie with no crust, but the moniker on the page definitely says, “cookie.”

In the Things to Wear book they continue getting on my nerves when they show a picture of two ponytail holders that say “hair accessories.”  I’m sorry… accessories?  These books are for kids under the age of three.  Could we please stick to nouns with more tangible definitions?

But it’s the Animals book that really pushes me over the edge.  Because on the page that says “bird”, they show a picture, not of a robin or a sparrow, but of a scarlet macaw.  That’s right, a parrot!  Again, if I’m the picture guy, and my book is full of animals, I know that the parent reading this book is going to point to the picture, read its name and ask, “What does the birdy say?”

Well, what does a freakin’ birdy say?  “Tweet, tweet,” right?  But the bird in their picture doesn’t say that.  He says, “Polly wanna cracker.”  Now I have to explain, then clarify, then re-clarify, all the while trying to make clear the original point, which is to say that while certain ornithological creatures utter one sort of mating cry, this particular winged beast, while cute in the traditional sense is rendered essentially unviewable because I have torn his page from the book and thrown it across the room.

And people wonder why so many kids are on Ritalin.

The eyes on one of The Girl’s rolling toys are drawn just slanted enough so that it appears to be scowling as it chases her across the kitchen floor.  The guy who painted the face on Raggedy Ann made it look like she hasn’t slept in a month.  And the etching of a plate of spaghetti on a green plastic pan looks suspiciously like a cannabis leaf.

Seriously book and toy people, you’re not giving my daughter a lot of options here.  Between books with lazy plotlines, illustrations that she’s better off not looking at, and toys that are so riddled with safety codes that they’re too boring to play with, you’re putting the burden on me to make up games and talk to her myself.  You’re forcing me to form an actual bond with my daughter at a time in her life when that void is supposed to be filled by your toys, books and “developmental videos”.

Well rest assured, if my daughter grows up feeling merely “loved and nurtured” rather than entertained and prep-school-ready, you’ll be hearing from my lawyers.  I’d love to discuss this further, but I hear The Girl laughing in the next room and I have to go dance, clap hands and play “Daddy’s Nose.”

Maybe you should too.

…sorry, that advice was unsolicited.

(from 2005)

Growing up, I had such fond memories of The Little Engine that Could.  But I never noticed just how badly it was written until I started reading it to my own daughter.  First of all, in a thirty-five-page book, the title character isn’t even introduced until page twenty-six.  Bad start.  After that, his only conflict is this little hill.  There’s no struggle, no character arc, and no moment of crisis where it seems like the good little boys and girls on the other side of the mountain might not get their toys.  The train says, “I think I can” a couple times, and then he’s done.

Talk about your go-nowhere plot.  If it only takes him a page and a half to get over that mountain, maybe it wasn’t such a daunting obstacle to begin with.  Beyond that, I don’t feel as though I’ve truly gotten to know this Little Engine.  What were his hopes and dreams?  What demons from his past is he trying to overcome?  Above all, what did he learn from his experience on the mountain?  I guess we’ll never know.

The fact that this book and others like it are regarded as classics just shows you what kind of bleak landscape the pre-Seuss literary world was.  Personally, I blame the Baby Boomers.  (Though, I tend to blame them for most of the bad things in this world.) After thirty years of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, they started looking back on their trite, empty little lives and yearned for some shred of lost innocence to pass on to the next generation.  Then one day in the late seventies, some Madison Avenue yuppie leaned over the mirror on his desk and said, “<<ssssssnort >> Um… wasn’t there a cute story about some little blue train pulling toys?  <<sniff>>”  Next thing you knew, every one of them was trying in vain to save their souls by reading this dreadful mockery of the written word to their Ritalin-filled kids.

Unfortunately, I’m discovering that, with few exceptions, today’s kid books aren’t much better.  Take, for instance, Five Little Ducks, in which a mother duck loses one of her children each day they go out.  Then at the end of the book, the little ducks just come back on their own.  Mother Duck doesn’t have to look for them.  She never seems to show any emotion over their disappearance.  She’s just a docile protagonist who gets saved in the end by an embarrassing use of the deus ex machina device.  The only reason I think this particular book got published in the first place was because, in some messed up way, it teaches kids about subtraction.  But jeez, must we invoke the fear of missing children to demonstrate basic math?

But they’re not all bad.  I can dig The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Even though the title character’s M.O. is somewhat dubious, at least he’s proactive about accomplishing his goal of eating as much as possible.  Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed is fun in a sing-songy way, and although I do take issue with a mama who continually fails to heed her doctor’s advice, the book does illustrate the concept of subtraction under less tragic circumstances than Five Little Ducks.

Not that I even require a book with a traditional story arc.  Our personal favorite is My Many Colored Days by Doctor Seuss, which uses brightly colored paintings and unconnected vignettes to simply give voice and validation to each of our daughter’s emotions.  If only they could all be like the Seuss, man.  Even now, looking at his work objectively without the beer goggles of early childhood, his books are still fun with fresh ideas that make you laugh and, more importantly, make you think.

I know…  They’re only kid’s stories.  And yes, right now The Girl is paying more attention to the pictures and sound of my voice than to the central theme and plot.  But I think we’ve lived under the lie the book publishers have sold us for long enough: the myth that “it doesn’t matter what you read to your kids as long as you’re reading.”

NO, I say.  This is America!  Since when did we allow ourselves to just blindly accept such low standards?  Unless a book is funny, rhymes or has particularly engaging illustrations, then I for one refuse to continue letting some burnt-out ex-hippie in a suit dictate what is good for my daughter just so he can alleviate the guilt over his own wasted life.

I hope you will join me.

(from 2005)

My daughter is almost nine months old.  It’s a great time around our house for several reasons.  The Girl is crawling and trying to talk and is an all around happy and content little kid.  But something else is happening as well.  Something wonderful and disgusting at the same time.  No I’m not talking about the introduction of solid foods and the new and interesting smells it adds to her diapers.  I’m referring to the fact that at some point between six months and a year after your first child is born, you suddenly realize that you are an expert… on everything.

It’s wonderful because now you know exactly what your child needs and when they need it, and it makes the whole parenting thing seem like less of a chore.  What makes it disgusting is the fact that every other parent on earth has realized the exact same thing.  And out of the goodness of their hearts, they want nothing more than to tell you exactly how you’re doing it wrong.

Everything from the toys you’re buying, to the stroller you’re using, to the number of times per day you’re feeding them.  Of course, Lauren and I are following the Attachment Parenting philosophy, which runs pretty much counter to every modern train of thought in childrearing, so we’ve been especially privileged because everybody is dying to correct us.  We listen and nod and smile painfully as if to say, “I’m humoring you now, but shut up before I stuff this burp rag down your throat.”

We’ve recognized that the only good advice is the kind that’s actually solicited, so we’ve done our best not to proselytize our views unless asked—or provoked.  It’s tough because, like I said, we’re experts now too and we feel compelled to tell everybody just how badly they’re screwing their own kids up.  But we’d like to hang onto at least a few of our friends, so we’re only giving advice to two groups of people: the toy makers and the book publishers.

So over the next couple weeks, I will be dispensing my own brand of parental advice.  That is to say, I will be whining and moaning about everything that’s wrong with the people I’m paying to help entertain and educate my daughter.

Let’s start with toy safety shall we?  The Girl owns a xylophone whose sticks are tied to the base so they don’t get lost.  Unfortunately, the strings are so short that you can’t actually hit the bells at the proper angle to elicit a resonating “ding.”  Apparently this is a safety feature so that the child doesn’t wrap the string around her neck.  But to me this is like selling a car but removing the gas tank for fear of an explosion.  Kind of defeats the purpose of why somebody would buy the thing in the first place doesn’t it?

That’s right, you didn’t misread.  I am in fact saying that there is too much safety in my daughter’s toys.

And I know in this era of frivolous lawsuits, corporations are afraid of getting sued for every child that chokes, vomits or bursts into flames.  That’s why I think Congress needs to pass a “Survival of the Fittest” bill that would exempt the toy companies from any harm done to a kid with stupid parents.  Natural Selection: the parents who let their kids wrap too many ropes around their necks don’t get to see their genes replicated in the next generation.

So I’m not blaming the toy companies per se, although they are inconsistent.  For instance, Allison owns a toy telephone whose chord is too short to actually lift the handset to her ear.  She either has to lean her head all the way to the floor or lift the entire phone off the ground.  Okay fine, strangulation hazard, I get that.  But then the phone has a three-foot string so she can pull it across the floor.  Um… hello!  If you’re going to give my kid a makeshift noose anyway, why not put it where it can actually make the toy functional?

But I digress.  Toy safety is just my pet peeve.  My real beef, which I’ll get into next time, is with the publishers of children’s books.  So listen up over the next couple weeks Penguin Putnam and the rest of you.  I’ll be expecting some changes to be made by my daughter’s next birthday.  If not, I may just lengthen the chord on her phone and send it to your kids as a present.