We live in Germany at the moment and I have to agree with you about many of the toys. You can still get real, solid things which can be passed on to their kids. But many of those toys are starting to suffer because kids aren't encouraged to play with anything besides video games. Even Playmobile feels it.

I'm kinda curious where some of the facts came from? 1, 3 & 5 don't seem to current. Or did I just have a blonde moment and miss the joke? :)

We (or my husband, rather) just bought that Playmobile pirate ship for our son for his birthday. I about fainted when he told me what it cost, but it was his only present from us, and it really is fantastic. The details are amazing - the hidden cannons, the flags, even a little parrot and a treasure map.

One other thing I love about Playmobile is the ambiguous gender of the little people. They all have medium-long hair. Thus our son has named his police officer "Judy" and the ambulance driver "Barbara".

The Muehil's... don't worry, I just couldn't find enough facts about Germany, and I found those on another blog by an exchange student living there. They sounded so ridiculous I threw them in to fill space, lol.

Nancy... we want the pirate ship so bad! We have the Victorian dollhouse and we had to donate a kidney to do it but we love it as much as they do, lol. It is funny about the people - the girls have designated certain ones boys and certain ones girls and I can't figure it out, ha ha.

Hello! I was so glad to read your thoughts about German Toys: I agree whole-heartedly! So much so that several years ago I started an online toy store business to make these beautiful German toys much more widely available and easy to find in the USA. We have in stock the entire line of Kathe Kruse dolls, Kinderkram, Selecta, Ostheimer toys, Kettler toys, and many, many more online at BlueberryForest. We are so concerned that many of these gorgeous toys soon may no longer be available in the USA; Selecta just issued a press release that they will no longer ship to the USA due to onerous new US regulatory administrative requirements that would raise the cost of the toys by more than 50%. Selecta and other European toy makers are already subject to often more stringent toy testing regulations than the US standards, but the various additional layer of US requirements apparently would cost-prohibitive for smaller toy companies such as Selecta. Many in the natural and hand-crafted toy business are worried that the result of the new USA regulations ironically will be that beautiful, hand-crafted European and USA-made toys no longer will be available in the USA, and only the mass-produced, cheap plastic made-in-China toys will be available. What a terrible, ironic result from legislation and regulation that resulted as a reaction to all of the safety problems with toys imported from China! We are so saddened that Selecta will no longer be shipping to us at blueberryforest or to other retailers in the USA. We hope this will not be the trend with our other European manufacturers! See the links at http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/ and www.nationalbankruptcyday.com for petition links and other resources. They liken the effect of the new toy safety legislation and rules to shutting down every farmer's market across the USA, and in effect only allowing the largest congolmerates to sell mass-produced produce. Actually maybe it's more like shutting down farmers' markets and creating a situation where only processed junk food is available (this result from a law and rules whose goal was supposed to bring us better, healthier)! Oh well, just thought you might be interested to know that it may soon become far more difficult to find wonderful German toys here in the USA. I'm guessing there still will be no shortage of toys made in China.