Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn. - Thoreau

It's a rainy day, a morning sickness day, a day of playing in cornmeal in baking pans. I have recently been listening to a discussion on an email list about toys... the nature of toys, the result on children, what people used to have. Here are the toys that we have:

1. Playmobile. We love German toys, and Playmobile is not Chinese, nor is it made of a plastic that is harmful. They lend themselves very easily to pretend play. We have the entire Victorian dollhouse and all of the accessories and we collect them because John and I love to play with them.

2. Duplo. These are the big version of Lego. I know that they are supposed to be for preschool, but growing up and having both, I found that I enjoyed Duplo more because you can build big stuff. We have an ENORMOUS bin of them and they are perfect for large projects like castles and cities.

3. Dress up. We have a big box of dress up. None of these items are those shiny princess things from the store, but instead all thrift-store finds like Chinese coats, scarves, belts, purses, weird shirts and other fun stuff.

4. Puppets. The girls aren't really into the puppets yet, but we have many, many animal puppets. We have dinosaurs, badgers, tigers, snow leopards, frogs, moose.... everything. We have used this to help us communicate sometimes and as they get older they are starting to use them more.

5. Board games. The only main-stream game we have for the girls is Candyland. The rest are Cranium games, cooperative German board games (from Ravensburger), the Farming Game, and Jr. Scrabble. The next games I get will be more from Ravensburger.

6. Kitchen supplies. We received a gift of very realistic metal kitchen pots, pans, and utensils. We also have a ceramic tea set. We have some plastic food as well. They build a kitchen out of books or boxes and start cooking.

7. Wooden puzzles. We have numbers, letters and a picture puzzle, but we also have a yet-unused giant wooden puzzle of America with many tiny pieces so it's for when they are older.

8. American Girls dolls. I have three original American Girl's dolls. Two of these are not the same as the dolls sold by Mattel and made in China. The original ones were designed and made by Götz in Germany, which you can distinguish by the white body. Now the dolls have a flesh-colored body. I would still buy more American Girl's dolls though, especially the Kaya doll or Josephina. The girls won't have these until they are 8 probably, and I was originally going to give them individually but I've decided to make this a group item.

9. Basket of Wooden Stuff. We have a big basket of wooden blocks, plus some little cars, rocks painted like bugs, corks, metal ring puzzles, wooden baby trains and cars and ring towers, some miscellaneous musical instruments like bells, whistles and Guatamalan flute, and other fun stuff.

And that's it for toys. We also have some educational items that we don't really consider 'toys' but are fun anyway... felts, stacking/nesting boxes with numbers, different forms of rock (including a floating rock), tangrams, a chalkboard and canvas art mat, and tons of art supplies. Plus the computer. It feels like a lot of stuff in the very small space that we live in, but it's really not in comparison to how many toys the average child has. The average American child receives 70 (yes that's SEVENTY) new toys every year.