Toys! Toys! Toys!

Madeleine needed some new toys. Or rather, I needed Madeleine to have some new toys. Anything to capture her attention for more than 2 minutes! I wanted some new toys to help us through the Hell Hour.

Two stores, ninety minutes and under thirty dollars later, I'm the proud owner of about 10 pounds of new toys. New to *us*, that is. I absolutely believe that babies do not need brand-new things. First off, they don't know the difference, and secondly, the next developmental stage comes all too soon, bringing its own slew of new needs. Not only that, but if you only paid $4 for something, you don't feel too bad about giving it away after it's served its purpose. It's not so easy to get rid of that $50 piece of singing-flashing-vibrating plastic that entertained your baby for a couple minutes once when she was 10 weeks old. Trust me.

We hit the Salvation Army and the Value Village near Bank and Walkley. We just missed the 50% off sale at the Sally Ann, but even still I walked away with a bus, a purse and a rabbit pelt for under $13.

The Value Village, however, was where it's at for kids' toys. There were, by conservative estimate, one million various dolls and stuffed animals hanging suffocating in plastic bags, several large bags of assorted big blocks (Mega Blocs, Lego and Duplo), even a Micro-Lite ice cream maker! I came out with one of the block bags, a shape sorter worm, and a tree house thing with an attached mat that says the alphabet and makes animal sounds for each letter. On the way out of the store, I was told repeatedly that X-rayfish begins with X. X-rayfish??? *sigh* Sadly, my vow to avoid electronic noise-making toys lasted about six months with her.

Anyway, it worked! Madeleine played with her tree-house-with-alphabet-animal-saying-mat for almost half an hour today. I'm going to be strategic in introducing the rest, and be sure to take away the last one when I introduce the new one to guarantee more thrill time a few weeks down the road.

Hell Hour, I'm ready to take you on!