Toys

      I'm having a case of writer's block. It doesn't happen very often thankfully, but when it does it's a frustrating experience. There are few things worse than staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen and having absolutely nothing to fill it with.
   I found an article on the internet on what to do when you get writer's block. The author had several good ideas of things to do to help cure writer's block. One of them is play, the author likes Legos. Actually that could work if I had toys in the house. One of the disadvantages to being a childless woman is that my house is bare of things for children to play with. The few children that visit either have to bring their own toys or play with the cat toys that I have. In fact, for some reason, children seem to really like cat toys.
  Maybe I should get some Play Doh  and Silly Putty. I used to really like playing with those when I was a kid. I also liked the Slinky. Does anyone remember what a Slinky is? It's a metal spring that you could make walk down stairs and do other things. I'm sure children of today would be baffled by the things that we enjoyed as kids.
  They would have no idea what to do with paper dolls. I loved paper dolls and I have a small case full of the ones I used to play with. My favourites were the ones that I played with when I went to visit my grandparents' house. They had the paper dolls that my aunts played with.  The best ones were the ones that were old movies stars like Judy Garland, Hedy LaMarr and Louise LaPlanche. They had fancy costumes that I dressed them in. I also liked making clothes for them. I would trace their shapes on some plain paper and then draw a dress around the shape. After that I would colour the dress with crayons or coloured pencils.
  I liked to play with my brother's train set. It wasn't fancy, just an oval track and a train with a few cars that would go around and around. I'd put blocks on the flat car and change the order of the other cars around. I'd load and unload the cars. The fun part was putting the track together. You had to do it just right or the train would not run.
  I can't imagine a child of today playing with an old train set. There are no bells and whistles on it. There are no lights. My set didn't have the kind of track that you could make twists and turns out of.  It just went around and around and I loved it.
     Looking back I'm sometimes baffled by things that we liked to play with. What was so fun about a Sit and Spin? For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about,a Sit and Spin is a plastic disc that a small child could sit on. In the middle was another disc on a tall handle. You used the tall handle to rotate and spin around. That's it. You literally sit and spin.
   I'm amused by the Easy Bake Oven. That was a small oven like thing that that you could actually bake things in. It used a large light bulb to provide the heat. I wanted one really bad when I was young. Instead my mother taught me how to use the real oven and how to bake. It started a lifelong love of baking cookies, bars and other treats. Unfortunately I don't bake much anymore as C and I don't need sweets around the house,but I can still remember all the good times I had making cookies in the kitchen at home.
  I really believe that I was lucky to grow up when I did. The toys that we had forced us to use our imaginations. We didn't just look at screens and push buttons or controllers. We mixed things in test tubes,put tracks together ,stacked things and built things. It was a good way to grow up.....