It’s Bigger on the Inside

I saw a commercial for, well, it was a toy set. The commercial was so frenetic, I wasn’t sure exactly what they were selling, but it was a toy set of some kind. Dolls in a hot tub, stuff like that. It had everything. The dolls, the house, yes, even the hot tub (minus any heat, of course).

It got me thinking about my childhood. It was about this time that the Sears and Montgomery catalogs would arrive and the sibs and I would start working on our letters to Santa (I learned when I was an adult that they actually arrived much earlier, but my mom hid them to limit the amount of time we’d fight over them). There were a lot of “reality” toys in the offerings. Toy ironing boards and baby beds. (Hey, I was a girl and didn’t spend that much time perusing the boy offerings, but I believe they also had toy lawnmowers.) I know my parents weren’t huge fans of stuff like that. We never had the play kitchen and the only reason I tasted an Easy Bake Oven cake was because I had a friend with one. 

We did get Creepy Crawlies, which were a lot of fun, despite the burns. Lol

But what really strikes me, looking back, is that most everything we did, we had to make up most of it. We might get a few props, but toys that gave us the whole experience? They got pushed aside pretty quickly because they put limits around our imaginations.

Most of my play life happened inside my head. (Like the tardis, it is bigger on the inside – haha)

Oh, I had Barbies and paper dolls, but I never had a Barbie playhouse. We just didn’t have room for something like that. But there was always room inside my head for everything and anything. Castles and rocket ships, travel to distant planets or the past? No problem. 

Do kids do that anymore? 

When I see signs of it with the grandkids, my heart swells with delight, because I know that somewhere out of my sight, they are taking magical journeys. 

Now that I’m all grown up, my imagination is still taking me to strange, exciting, and/or interesting places. 

But you know, I see a fun toy and I still want to sit down and try it out. Lol

How about you? Are you ever tempted to sit down and “try“ the toy you never got as a kid?

Perilously yours,

Pauline