Nostoylgia

The weekly emails I get from Fisher Price, Baby Center, Toys-R-Us and others telling me about the latest must-buy toys for my toddler has me harkening back to my own childhood and most beloved toys. So I thought I'd see how many of them I could dredge up on the internets. And was not surprised to find that I was able to locate quite a few :-). And so, I bring you "The Collection", helpfully categorized for your perusing pleasure.

1) Toys that were deemed Choking Hazards by the parents of the latest generation and hence they and their accessories were redesigned for the good of humanity

I had all the Little People play set essentials. The bus, the jet plane, the family & pets, and the house and all the home accessories - bath, kitchen, nursery, bedroom, living room, laundry room. And I never choked on a single one.

2) Toys mimicking real objects that are unrecognizable to any child born after the year 2000

Of course, you have to start out with the old, analog, dial phone. That's a phone? Oddly enough, we got a rather nice hand-me-down one from some friends and while Bobbin thought it was cool and fun to push and pull around, she never actually tried to use it as a phone, whereas she tries to use our kitchen timers, calculators, ipods, and other pocket-sized electronic devices (real or toy) as phones all the time.

The Fisher Price Camera - What kid born in this digital age would recognize the shape and the rotating flash cube at the top?

Do schools even use chalk boards now? Or is everything a whiteboard? This was my Fisher Price chalkboard desk. I loved this thing. It kept me entertained for hours on end.

Long before the advent of CDs there were these things called Records. And Fisher Price made a rough-and-tumble toddler-proof plastic version complete with "records". My favourite one was "Edelweiss".

And before ipods and mp3players there were these things called Radios, and they had these big knobs.

Remember when milk was delivered in glass bottles to your door by the milkman? No... neither do I. Even that was a tad before my time at the height of its popularity. But that didn't stop me from having tonnes of fun makebelieving at milk delivery with the fisher price milk bottles.

3) Toys that were discontinued for no good reason that I can understand apart from the fact that their appearance dates them to the 1970s.

Baby Beans! This cutie was such a popular dolly in our household that my sister got her very own brand new one when she was a baby, as opposed to inheriting mine. I loved my baby beans, and Sarah loved hers.

Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub... maybe it was discontinued because they couldn't come up with a politically correct marketing campaign for it in later years when that stuff started to matter more?

Hickory dickory dock, I had this fisher price clock.

And this sewing kit, the scissors of which I used to use to cut the grey hairs out of my Grandpa's perfectly snowy-white hair-covered head, at his suggestion, as he lay on our couch napping. He wasn't fooling anyone including 6-year-old me; this is how he got a nice relaxing scalp massage :-)

And one of my all time favourites - the Fisher Price Wagon!

There were a couple of other favourites I didn't locate - my little yellow plastic ride-on duck with the red wheels, my Holly Hobbie Cardboard play house, and my little yellow oven that really baked (not an easy-bake. Mine actually looked like a real stove and oven which was way cooler). And of course my teddy bear and my favourite doll Velvet (until I coloured her face like a clown with a permanent marker while playing "circus" alone in my room. but that's another story). And I used to love playing with my sister's cool Fisher Price stove top and sink (despite being 8 years older) but I didn't come across those either. They were fun. I used to arrange them in the basement rec room on top of the toyboxes to make a pretend kitchen. I also had tonnes of barbies and barbie accessories, but that could be a post in and of itself.

All in all, we seem to be doing pretty well on the toy front. Bobbin still gets daily playing in with all the toys she got over a year ago at Christmas, her birthday and this past christmas. So we must be making pretty decent choices :-). Still... I wonder what Little People and Weebles will look like when she's my age? And what will the toy version of however we consume our music look like? And will there be any such thing as a toy that doesn't have a battery (they're getting rarer and rarer to find!)

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