The Good Ol' Days

When I grew up, you MIGHT have needed batteries for a new toy you got for Christmas. But probably not. Star Wars action figures? No batteries. Barbies? No batteries. Light Brite? It plugged into the wall. Dolls, stuffed animals, bicycles, art supplies, Donny & Marie record player, boom box? You get the idea. All of these were either self or child powered or they plugged into the wall. The boom box and the Sony Walkman were my first real toys that needed batteries but only if you needed the devices to be portable. If you were going to use them at home. you could just plug them into the wall.

This Christmas helped me to truly understand that this is not the case any longer. Not only do you need batteries for EVERY toy imaginable, you also have to install software on your computer to connect the toy so it will work. The girls got two Leap Frog Tag reading systems. This is a pen like device you hold in your hand and it will either read you a book that goes along with the system, it will help you read the book yourself if you are ready for that, it will play all sorts of games with you on three different levels and it will do all this in the actual voices of the characters. In other words when Ariel or Thomas the Train or Diego speaks, it's their voices that you hear. It took like 45 minutes to download the software and set up both tag pens and download all the audio for the books we have. Oy Vey. They also got this super cute dog from Cayden and Emma's parents. The dog grows from puppy to full grown over a 4 day period. It sings songs with it's name in them and sings songs with your child's name. In order for this magic to happen...you guessed it! Batteries are needed and a degree in computer science is needed. What the freak? Now, don't get me wrong. These toys are RAD and my kids LOVE them but in the good ol' days, parents just had to buy the present. The kid could unwrap it themselves and actually begin to play with it right then and there. I am sure by the time the girls are tweens, I'll have to download software for their lip gloss to be activated and I'm sure they will need $3,000 lap tops in order to do their homework and take notes in junior high school. I just needed my trusty Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker and my erase- A -mate ball point pen.

In summary I am old, I miss the olden days and I will be dusting off my boom box so I can listen to my old tapes that I recorded off the radio. Ipod shmypod.