Politically incorrect toys has been a topic coming at me from all directions in the last week, internet and home. Not that I am buying toys for anyone these days. I have probably bought ten times my share of toys. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t buy so much crap. I don’t know what I was thinking. I certainly wasn’t a deprived child. What the heck did I think I was making up for?

There’s the whole doll thing. I credit Nancy Nall for writing a better blog entry about this than I can manage. But. Barbies? Bratz? We didn’t have Bratz around here. I didn’t outlaw them, they just didn’t exist when my daughters were babies. I wonder if I’d’ve tried to ban Bratz if they had been around then. I don’t know. By the time Bratz came out, the beach urchins were more interested in things like driving. They were most interested in Barbie when they were babies. She was the hot thing among the nursery school set. It was an ownership thing! Everybody’s getting Barbie dolls and they’re pretty and I want one too. They are fun for a while. But it is REALLY REALLY hard to get their clothing on and off. And their heads pop off. And we won’t even talk about those stupid shoes. But then. When Lizard was seven or so, she and a friend used her Barbie “case” as a spy accessory. I found it in the Landfill Dungeon with every remote control device in the house. A couple years after that, all of the Barbie stuff was sold at a garage sale.

So… I *had* girls but I am *married* to a boy and he kind of likes guns just a teensy tinesy little bit and whaddya do if you are a politically correct Planet Ann Arbor moom and you have a *boy* child (I don’t though) and you forbid any kind of guns in your house, real guns or toy guns or toast cut-out guns or whatever. “We don’t shoot people”, says the moom who so carefully selects every school her child attends [and college because most planet A2 children get to college, except those who don’t]. But kids do play those games, even girls, let me tell you about growing up on the south side of Sault Ste. Siberia.

I could go on and on about this but I have to tell one of my favorite stories about shooting-type games from Fin Family Moominbeach back in about 1966, which would’ve been when I was 12. The Engineer (my younger brother) and his friend walked up to my older boy cousin (Grinch). They asked the Grinch, “How ’bout you be Raid and we’ll be insects?” And so, the Grunchy old Grinch sat on whatever pulp-log structure we had on the beach that summer (it varied) and pushed on his head with one of his hands and made a sound like an aerosol can being sprayed. The Engineer and Kev fell back on the sand, writhing in the agony of a dramatic death.

Crocuses? Those crocuses are from yesterday, not last spring. Admittedly, that particular yard has a micro-climate going on.

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