Haunted Toys

The bear is innocent!

Now that our last babies are getting older, we are finally able to expunge the house of toys that they have outgrown.  No toys are more gladly tossed or donated than those that we call Haunted Toys.  You know what these are.  The puzzles that are light activated, and bleat like sheep or croak electronically if the puzzle piece is not in place when the lights go off at night. The toys that are motion activated, and if sitting near a heat register, will start bleeping and tweeting in the middle of the night. More than once, we have woken up on high alert, and tip-toed downstairs to make sure our house wasn't being burgled.

Still other toy designers think it's a great practical joke to make toys that don't have off switches.  I choose to believe in karma, because I need to know that someday, those toy designers are going to be stuck somewhere with the mind-numbing toys that they made, listening to the songs over and over and over. Like that guy in the 80s who rolled his car while listening to his Wham! cassette, and was forced to listen to Careless Whispers on repeat for something like 7 hours.

I am the Babbling Bee...
I'll drive you insane, tee hee...

A friend of ours had a baby while we were in between ours, and borrowed some baby toys from us. We loaned them to her gladly, but on condition that she kept one particular toy, the Fisher Price First Sounds Bee.  This particular toy was touch-activated, and had no off switch. She kept her word, and kept the toy, but the song still lingers in our heads.  Even my 10 year old can still sing it. "I am a babbling bee, I'll sing you a song tee-hee... I am a babbling bee.... fiddle dee diddle dee dee..." (Thankfully, and inexplicably, we are still friends with the new Babbling Bee keepers.)

Haunted toys still lurk in the far corners of our house, but they are endangered.  I recall one night when my husband had had enough.  The kids were in bed, we had settled in with our respective electronic toys of our own, and suddenly we heard the horse puzzle go off downstairs.  It was one of those Melissa and Doug puzzles that is light activated, and when you put the correct puzzle piece in its place, it makes the corresponding animal noise. My husband suddenly became insane. "THAT'S IT!  I'VE HAD IT!"  I stayed out of his way while he stormed downstairs to grab the puzzle and take it out into the garage.  Where he proceeded to beat the thing to death with a hammer. He came back upstairs, looking a little crazed behind his normally calm eyes, and said, "Well, that won't be giving us any trouble anymore."

Or so he thought. When I went out into the garage the next day and turned on the light, I heard this garbled "NNAaa-ayy" emanating from the garbage can. If you are a person with no kids, and you never plan to have kids, and for some reason, you really want to stick it to some new parents, I have a list of toys for you.  By all means, do your worst, but remember that revenge is sweet, and a lot of these parents have hammers.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

*Thank you Jill W. for inspiring this post. And Mel, we are long overdue for dinner with you guys and the bee.