I’ve always liked the cheerful chaos that children’s toys introduce into a space. But lately, it feels like my daughter’s toys are taking over. Her playpen, strewn with stuffed animals and stacking rings and teethers and colorful scarves and god knows what else, has taken over our entire living room. When I climbed into bed the other night, I was promptly impaled on a sharp wooden block. A plush tiger and giraffe sleep under my pillow. There are some toys I really love: a stuffed windstorm with googly eyes; a plastic carton of eggs that, when opened, reveal shapes and numbers inside. But the rest are mostly interchangeable annoyances I try fruitlessly to corral. They overflow the toy box and bleed onto the floor. You know what reproduces faster than fruit flies? Toys. They are hellbent on tripping me up. Toys might be for playing, sure, but they’re also very good at stabbing me in the foot.
I’m not entirely sure where all these toys came from – I’ve bought my child exactly one stuffed animal in her nearly eleven months of life. Somehow, they keep showing up. It feels like excess I didn’t ask for, a casualty of consumerism and my inability to say no to people’s hand-me-downs. And I don’t really know what to do about it. Throw them out? Seems wasteful. Donate them – perhaps, but does anyone else really want this stuff? Wear protective shoes and stuff them back in a box until they are dumped on the floor again? For now, that seems like the best approach.
– Sarah Harris, digital editor at the Addison Independent