I feel your pain. Every time I visit my daughter's family, the "living room" is wall-to-wall toys. When they moved in three years ago, this large space held a few playthings for their rug-rat son. He learned to walk in that open space. Now, his rug-rat sister can't move more than a foot or two in any direction with a barrier of toys in her way. While the adults manage to step between the individual bits of debris, the boy simply stumbles over everything. It's a wonder he hasn't dashed his head in a fall. Years ago, I would pick up and organize the growing number of toys, but now that I'm older and more tired and stiff, the piles of blocks, race tracks with cars, stuffed animals, books, and whatever is so daunthing, I just sit there and look at it in dismay. I asked my daughter if I could go through it all and take away some things that may no longer be useful and she said, "Oh, but he still plays with it all." sigh. And now we have a little girl who is getting her own toys to add to his that she plays with. MAKE IT STOP!
hahaah yeah, we'd totally packed to the gills like your daughter if my wife wasn't so adamant that we don't keep pushing things into the mess! For all the doom and gloom in the news, middle class americans are drowning in a cornucopia of stuff.
It's like Bill Maher said in his recent New Rules: "Even our poor people are fat." Maybe you recall some government wonk said right after 9/11 that if we wanted to do something to help America, go out and buy things. If we didn't, the economy would collapse.
hahaha yeah, that was one of the funnier things I remember from that time. I just graduated from college in the middle of the dot-com crash and had no spare cash to patriotically buy stuff!
There’s a lot of beauty and wisdom in how happy a box of “common” collectibles can make children
Yes! It’s us adults who get all weird about value and stuff!
I feel your pain. Every time I visit my daughter's family, the "living room" is wall-to-wall toys. When they moved in three years ago, this large space held a few playthings for their rug-rat son. He learned to walk in that open space. Now, his rug-rat sister can't move more than a foot or two in any direction with a barrier of toys in her way. While the adults manage to step between the individual bits of debris, the boy simply stumbles over everything. It's a wonder he hasn't dashed his head in a fall. Years ago, I would pick up and organize the growing number of toys, but now that I'm older and more tired and stiff, the piles of blocks, race tracks with cars, stuffed animals, books, and whatever is so daunthing, I just sit there and look at it in dismay. I asked my daughter if I could go through it all and take away some things that may no longer be useful and she said, "Oh, but he still plays with it all." sigh. And now we have a little girl who is getting her own toys to add to his that she plays with. MAKE IT STOP!
hahaah yeah, we'd totally packed to the gills like your daughter if my wife wasn't so adamant that we don't keep pushing things into the mess! For all the doom and gloom in the news, middle class americans are drowning in a cornucopia of stuff.
It's like Bill Maher said in his recent New Rules: "Even our poor people are fat." Maybe you recall some government wonk said right after 9/11 that if we wanted to do something to help America, go out and buy things. If we didn't, the economy would collapse.
hahaha yeah, that was one of the funnier things I remember from that time. I just graduated from college in the middle of the dot-com crash and had no spare cash to patriotically buy stuff!
Like many of us at the time.