The Chronic Consumer

I’d heard a lot of good things about the children’s book Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, so I decided to buy it for my boy’s collection. I purchased it online from Amazon.com, where it currently has a 4-star average rating out of more than 700 customer reviews. I read a couple of the reviews, both positive and negative before buying, but didn’t really do too much other research.

The book tells the story of a mother’s unconditional love for her son as he goes through various stages of growth and development: troublesome toddler, sullen teenager, etc. The mother is shown to sneak into the son’s room at night and rock him back and forth as he sleeps. She continues to do this even when her son is a full-grown adult. Then, as the mother ages and gets too old to rock her son, the roles switch and the son rocks the mother.

Now this might sound like a sweet story in theory, but as executed in the book it just came off as uber-creepy. This has everything to do with the drawings by Shelia McGraw, which show the mother crawling into her son’s room on all fours to rock him even when he’s a teenager and stuff.

Look, I tried not to be weirded out by the book, and I really did want to like it. But it just seemed so odd to me that a mother — any mother — would climb a ladder to enter her adult son’s bedroom and rock him in the middle of the night.

I ended up not reading this to my son, and will give it away to the local library the next time they collect books for their annual book fair. I’ve got nothing against people who like Love You Forever; it’s just not something that works for me.

I haven’t had much success buying new Nintendo DS games for my soon-to-be 5-year-old son. He wasn’t able to handle Pac ‘N’ Roll, and gave up on DK Jungle Climber rather quickly as well. There aren’t any upcoming releases that look like they’d be suitable for him, so I decided to go retro and buy a used title instead. What I ended up with was Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, which came out way back in 2002 — for Game Boy Advance. (Remember that Nintendo DS systems have an additional slot for GBA cartridges, so there was no problem getting this title to work.)

My son already has Kirby Squeak Squad, a newer title in the series, so he was somewhat familiar with the gameplay in Nightmare in Dream Land. In this game, the player controls Kirby, who must try to recover the stolen Rod of Dreams, without which, no one in Dream Land can dream. My son didn’t quite get the back story, but it doesn’t matter. He knows that he basically has to battle various enemies as he moves through the different stages.

As with Squeak Squad, Kirby can inhale/swallow his enemies in order to copy their powers and special abilities. On his own, Kirby can only walk, float, swim, and jump, so it really helps to be able to get those extra powers.

The gameplay is fairly simple, making Nightmare in Dream Land perfect for my 5-year-old. Kirby can get hit six times by enemies before actually dying, so each turn lasts a very long time. Plus, there are always chances to score additional lives, meaning that this game is just about as easy as they come. The graphics aren’t that great because the title is relatively old, but my son doesn’t care about that.

Overall, I think Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land is an excellent option for those of you with younger children. I bought this game used from an Amazon.com reseller for about $14.99 + shipping (compared to the outrageous $59.99 price tag I’ve seen for brand-new, unopened versions). I didn’t get a box or a manual with the game, but it doesn’t matter. It works fine and my son was able to figure out how to play with no problems, so I definitely recommend this one!

My preschool-aged son was having trouble identifying the ABCs, so I thought it would be helpful to buy him a toy that would make learning the letters more fun. He can say or sing the ABCs with no problem, but actually reading the letters is a different story.

I first tried giving him wooden blocks with letters on the sides or ABC magnets for the refrigerator, but he didn’t play with those for very long. What can I say, kids these days need their toys to light up, flash, and talk to them or they’re just not interested! So I ended up buying a product called the Winnie the Pooh Light-Up Alphabet Log from a discount toy website for about $20.

The Light-Up Alphabet Log (pictured above, click to enlarge) basically consists of buttons featuring the letters A-Z, as well as a song button so kids can sing the alphabet song with Winnie. All the buttons have both uppercase and lowercase letters (Aa, Bb, Cc, etc.) and pictures to reinforce the phonetic sounds that the letters make (apple, boat, cap, etc.). When you push a button, Winnie’s voice kicks in to say the letter and the word that corresponds to the picture.

Kids can choose from four different activities on the Alphabet Log: Learn Letter & Sound (just pushing random buttons and having Winnie say the letters); Can You Find It (Winnie calls out a letter and the child has to push the right button); Before & After (”Press the letter that comes before ‘L’”); and the Memory Challenge (kids build up a sequence of letter buttons to press).

My son definitely likes this toy a lot better than any of the other alphabet-related items that I’ve purchased for him in the past, so that’s a step in the right direction. He has been playing with this toy every day ever since I bought it, and his letter identification skills actually have improved a great deal in that time. He now has a majority of the letters down pat, and I’m sure he’ll learn the rest in due time.

Overall, I’m pleased with the Winnie the Pooh Light-Up Alphabet Log. It’s a little loud for my tastes, but as long as my son likes it and is learning his letters, then I can’t complain too much! This product is manufactured by VTech Toys, and can be purchased from Cheapees.com.

My four-year-old son gets one hour of quiet time per day (30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon) during which he is only allowed to read, draw, color, or play with toys that don’t have batteries. I think it’s important for him to be “unplugged” like this, so I enforce quiet time pretty strictly.

I also make an effort to buy him a good mix of toys that would be appropriate for quiet time, which is why I recently purchased a View-Master 3D Viewer.

I had a View-Master when I was a kid, and remember that I never got tired of looking at my Dumbo, Bambi, and Snow White reels. I figured my son would enjoy the updated version, so long as he had some interesting reels to look at. I hoped that dinosaurs, Thomas the Tank Engine, SpongeBob SquarePants, sea creatures, and African safari animals would keep him busy for a bit.

The updated View-Master is fairly simple for even young children (like my son) to use. Once I taught him which way to put the reels in so the pictures would show up properly, he was able to change them out himself whenever he wanted. The lever to advance the reels is nice and big, making it easy for my son to push it in order to scroll through the pictures.

The View-Master also comes with a clip that can attach to a neck strap or belt loop or whatever, but my son has never used it.

When we first got the View-Master, my son really enjoyed playing with it. But now that it’s been a few weeks and he’s seen all of his reels several times, he has pretty much cast the toy aside and hasn’t touched it in a while — not even during quiet time.

The View-Master only cost $5.99 at Wal-Mart, so it’s not as though I’m out a bundle of money here. But still… it would have been nice for the toy to retain its attraction for a bit longer. I guess I’ll just have to keep buying new reels for it!

My son is getting to the point where he can start playing easy board games with us. So I took him shopping a few weeks ago to choose a new game for family night. After looking through the selection at Toys ‘R Us, he settled on Operation. I had a feeling that the game would be a bit too difficult for him because the recommended ages are 6 and up, but he’s not quite 5 yet. Nevertheless, that was the game he had his heart set on, so I decided to go ahead and get it for him.

Operation has been around since 1965, and is a game that I remember seeing around as a kid (even though my family never had it). The board consists of a picture of a patient on an operating table. There are oddly shaped holes placed around the body, and inside each one are small plastic pieces depicting various ailments: a bucket of water for “water on the knee”; an ice cream cone for “brain freeze”; a pencil for “writer’s cramp”; a horse for “charley horse” etc. There are also two decks of cards (Doctor and Specialist), and some play money.

To begin the game, each player gets one Specialist card, then you take turns drawing from the Doctor cards. The Doctor cards tell you which ailment you have to try to remove with a special pair of tweezers attached to the board. You have to pick the plastic ailment piece out of its hole without touching the sides of the board.

If you succeed, you earn the dollar amount designated on the Doctor card. If you touch the side, a buzzer goes off and the patient’s nose flashes with a red light. You lose your turn, and the player holding the Specialist card gets a chance to perform the operation — for double the original price.

As expected, my son has a lot of trouble removing the ailment pieces cleanly. He hates the buzzer sound, so when it’s his turn, we switch the board off and just let him try to take the piece out any way he can. When he gets older, we can play according to the rules; but for now, I think this is fine.

We’ve played Operation several times since we bought the game, and we do have a lot of fun with it. The pieces are very easy for adults to remove, so there’s not much of a challenge in that way. However, some of the pieces are very hard to grip, which makes for a bit of competition now and then.

Overall, I think Operation would is a great game for older children to play amongst themselves. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a family game because it really is too easy for adults, but I’m sure a group of kids could have fun with it. I think it was definitely worth the money!

A lot of the friends I’ve known since high school and college are finally starting to have kids of their own now, which means I’ve been buying lots of baby clothes and other gifts in recent months.

During the process, I’ve come across a lot of great baby-related websites that I never would have found on my own, and have discovered numerous products that I would have loved to have for my boy when he was that age.

I’ve also learned that prepackaged gift sets that come filled with items for newborns (bibs, onesies, booties, caps) are a godsend to those of us who are too busy to show for these items separately. All I do is order a gift box, fill in the recipient info, and I’m done. Perfect!

After getting off to a rough start at preschool this year (crying, not participating in activities), my son has been doing great for the past few weeks. I therefore decided to reward him by buying a new game for his Nintendo DS, as it’s been a while since the last new title. It was tough trying to find something that a four-and-a-half year old can play, but I eventually settled on something called Pac ‘N Roll.

Pac ‘N Roll is loosely based on the old Pac-Man game that took the entire world by storm in the 1980s. By “loosely based,” I mean you play as Pac-Man, you eat pellets, and you have ghosts chasing you. Other than those components, however, Pac ‘N Roll is quite different from the original in actual gameplay.

Gameplay in Pac ‘N Roll consists of using the NDS stylus to maneuver Pac-Man through various worlds. You more or less just follow a single trail of pellets from beginning to end, trying to avoid ghosts along the way. There are the usual power pellets that allow you to defeat the ghosts, and this game also includes special “modifier items” like a suit of armor or pair of wings that accordingly influence the speed and agility of Pac-Man.

Each world only takes a few minutes to complete (at least in the beginning stages; I haven’t made it all the way through the game yet), which is a plus because you can knock out a few levels while waiting at the dentist office or whatever.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take the extensive stylus usage into account when buying this game for my son. At his age, he simply doesn’t have the manual dexterity required to control the stylus precisely enough to play Pac ‘N Roll, so after a few frustrating attempts, he had to give up on the game. I wish there was a way to toggle the controls between the stylus and the directional keys, but that’s not the case. So for now my son has to settle for watching me play the game. Hopefully he’ll be able to handle the stylus a little better in a few months, so we’ll definitely try again later.

Overall, Pac ‘N Roll for the Nintendo DS is a decent game. I must have missed the age recommendation in the product description while I was shopping otherwise I wouldn’t have bought this for my kid. Oh, well. I think I paid $19.99 for the game, so it’s not a big deal to have it sit on the shelf for a while.

(Click images to enlarge.)

We’ve been redecorating my son’s bedroom in bits and pieces. We started with wall hangings and shelving, and now we’re finally ready to move on to furniture. We’ve gotten rid of the rocking chair that had been in there since he was a baby, as well as some of the plastic storage containers that we were using for his toys. We’re buying a bureau and a night table next.

After that, we’re going to look at bunk beds. We’re not planning on having another child or anything; my son has just expressed an interest in getting a bunk bed because he loves the idea of climbing up a little ladder and sleeping so high off the ground.

Anyway, that’s still a couple months off, but I’d like to start shopping around now just to see what kind of prices we’ll be looking at.

I’m already looking ahead to Christmas and thinking about what kind of toys I’m going to buy my son this year. I’m really leaning towards going low-tech for a change, which means no Nintendo DS games, no motorized dolls like Tickle Me Elmo — in short, nothing that requires a battery or has a built in WiFi connection.

I would love for my son to discover the low-tech toys that I grew up with. For example, he has never experienced the joy of putting together a jigsaw puzzle or the delight of assembling and flying a balsa wood airplane. It seems that all my son ever does these days is play video games, and now he’s getting interested in my computer, so I want to open his eyes to some simple toys that can be just as fun as anything else he has.

I’ll probably cave in and buy at least one DS cartridge, but I’m going to try to get my son to play with the other stuff first.

Think this plan will work?

My son is getting to that age where he can begin to enjoy playing board games with the rest of the family. My husband and I have therefore been buying some simple games that we think he would enjoy, like the classic face-guessing game from Hasbro called, appropriately enough, Guess Who?

This game is very easy to play, with no reading required at all. It’s for 2 players only, which keeps things nice and simple for everyone. Each player has a board consisting of 30 flip-up/flip-down cards with distinctive faces on them. There are also playing cards that have the same faces on them. You start the game with each person picking a single playing card. You then have to try to guess which player card your opponent picked by using a process of elimination. You may only ask Yes/No questions (Is your person a man? Does he have a beard? Is he wearing glasses?) and eventually you should be able to figure out which player card your opponent picked at the beginning of the game.

We have a lot of fun with this game. Obviously after a while you get into a pattern of always asking the same questions, but my son doesn’t seem to notice that. The recommended ages on the box says 6 & Up; however, I can’t imagine too many 12-year-olds enjoying Guess Who? for long. My son is four-and-a-half and he does pretty well with this game. It took him a while to get the hang of how to ask questions and eliminate choices, but now he seems to understand the concept of the game. He’s not exactly a tough opponent, but we still have lots of fun!

Overall, Guess Who? is a nice starter game that I recommend for kids between 4-8 (depending on maturity). It only takes five minutes or so to complete each game, so you don’t have to set aside a lot of time to play. Check it out; I’m sure your kids will love it!

(Click photo to enlarge.)