The Land of Crappy Toys

Tonight when Lucy told our guest she would get her baby something to play with from The Land of Crappy Toys, my guest’s eyes widened, her eyebrows went up and her mouth even formed a tiny, little “o”. Maybe I should teach my kids a different name for that cabinet in the living room.

Whatever you choose to call it, you have that place in your house, right? The place where all the random toys collect? Mine is a cabinet in the bottom of a bookshelf in my living room. An quick inventory tells me that we have a slinky, magic 8-ball, plastic spinning top, three small blow-up “beach balls” from Pump-it-Up parties, countless Happy Meal toys, a couple of jump ropes, a yoyo, a selection of Hot Wheels cars and roughly a dozen super balls. When the cabinet begins to overflow, we donate anything that's worth a damn, throw the rest away and start our collection anew. It’s not a perfect system, I’ll admit, and I honestly do make an effort to not collect these types of cheap, disposable toys, but still they accumulate. So, as is our custom in the Heagler house, we give it a snappy name and learn to live with it.

After our guests had gone, Lucy noticed they had left a toy behind. I started to take it from her, but she said “that’s OK, mommy, I’ll just put it in The Land of Things Belonging to Other People” (a shelf in our coat closet with Lola’s socks, Bella’s sweatshirt, a hello Kitty watch belonging to god-knows-who, Mary Crandell’s tupperwear and now… Keaton’s ball). You have that place in your house too, right?