Ashland 2.0

We’ve been feeling somewhat badly for Ashland that most of toys we have are decidedly *girlie*. It’s not that we think that girls should play with “girl” toys and boys with “boy” toys, but we thought it’s only fair that there’s variety or balance of sorts. Of course we have some gender neutral (…whatever that really means!) toys too, like a lot of wooden toys (which are sustaining serious damage due to Ashland gnawing on them) and legos (we all love legos here — we’ll definitely have to get more) but still, pink is over powering!

And we’ve looked for some toys Ashland might enjoy playing with (he obviously loves things with wheels on) at various stores but we couldn’t find anything worth buying. Seriously, all we found were really ugly and cheap looking unimaginative things! We looked at various train sets and found that one tiny little train (about 2.5 inches across, tracks sold separately!) is $21.99, and poorly made — I wouldn’t want it for $3.00! I’m guessing that most of the cost goes towards licensing this train “character” and not towards making quality product. There’s more variety of toys online, but toys are one of those things I don’t like to buy online because it’s difficult to determine quality from low resolution photos.

Then we remembered Ashland’s grandparents saying that there are toys Todd played with years ago still left in storage…and we had some of them shipped to us! And so the the vintage big red farm house, circus train with animals, and safari jeep set came to us in mail (thank you!). I’m currently washing all the toy pieces…but check this out:

Fisher-Price brand car and a man (…if you can call him that!) that are currently in stores. This car doesn’t even have steering wheels.

And here is a car and a man also by Fisher-Price from about 30 years ago:

It’s a very curious thing — I can’t help wondering what happened in 30 years.