Plastic-animals-24

Plastic Animals

My daughter is spoiled, but she’s not spoiled by me. I do tend to get her quite a few gifts for Christmas, but I do not spoiled her any other time of the year. This cannot be said for the rest of my family. The poor child has no idea what the word ‘no’ means when it comes to her grandparents and some of her aunts. Imagine my surprise when I bought her a bag of plastic animals and these became her favorite toys over anything else in her room.

Last year when we went away on a road trip with a friend her plastic animals were some of the few toys she wanted to take with her. I asked her to put together a bag of small toys to keep in the car so that she might be occupied on the long ride. She played with her plastic animals quite a bit while in the car, and I could not believe how well she kept herself occupied while she was playing with them. These toys even proved to offer quite a bit of amusement for myself and my friend as we went down the road.

My daughter had lined up some of her plastic animals along the side window. Every time we went around the corner the animals would fall. At this particular time, my friend was driving, and I was in the passenger seat. Though my friend could not hear my daughter, I heard her loud and clear. She was getting upset with my friend for driving around corners, because all of her plastic animals would fall from the door onto the floor. After a while I got tired of turning around to pick them up, and I asked my friend to please drive straight.

After the laughter died down, my daughter began telling my friend that she wished she would also drive straight, just as I had just said. I tried to explain to her that I was joking, and that she would just have to put up with the plastic animals falling over. If we were to drive straight, we would have driven straight into the ocean. Because my daughter was only four, she thought this was a splendid idea. She finally figured out that perhaps the window was not the best place to be playing with her plastic animals, and the rest of the drive went by uneventfully. It still amazes me today that these cheap plastic animals are treasured items, when the fifty dollar dollhouse sits untouched.