waiting for the batteries to die

Despite my vows during pregnancy to allow my son only quiet, creativity-inspiring toys, the reality is that I now live in a house full of brightly-colored plastic noisemakers.  At any moment during the day you can hear the alphabet being sung by a caterpillar, birds chirping out the side of a plastic tree, various farm animals neighing and baaahing and moooing, or the sound of construction vehicles rev-rev-revving up in my living room.

My son received his most annoying noisy toy for his birthday recently. It’s the noisy toy that all the others want to be, but are far too weak to compete.  The playskool treehouse can only play circus music--lame.  The Little People farm bleats out animal sounds that are partially drowned out inside the barn---yawn.  But the ride-on construction vehicle, with its lifelike key that starts up the engine and then three other buttons that can be pressed for more noise, makes the others look like mutes.  It is the noisemaker supreme.  One button makes the backing up sound, and is just as loud and lifelike with its repetitive BEEP-BEEP-BEEPing as being behind an actual schoolbus or dump truck in reverse.  Another button replicates the sound of heavy construction vehicles driving over rocks and sounds like a top fuel car revving up at the starting line.  And the last button is just a deep, robotic male voice that yells out EX-CA-VATOR when you press it.  As though a real excavator operator would ever need to identify his equipment by screaming it out over a loudspeaker on the construction site.

I have so many things around here that take batteries, like my book light that I use to read in bed when Eli’s trying to sleep, or my camera that I’m constantly snapping pictures with, so I know how batteries work and I know that they eventually run out.  But what kind of batteries are they putting in toys?  I’m starting to doubt that they’re batteries at all, and they’re fueled by some kind of secret radioactive power source with a half life of 2 million years, because unlike every other battery powered thing in this house, the batteries in the noisy toys NEVER DIE. 

But I can’t just throw them out because some of the toys are fun, and I play with them myself.  The Leapfrog learning toys are my favorite.  We have a rolling alphabet ball that makes letter sounds, recites the alphabet, and if you put it in a special mode, it will play songs that start with each letter of the alphabet.  “O” is Old MacDonald, “C” is Oh my darlin’ Clementine, and “G” is Greensleeves.  I found this out by accident one day when I was playing with my son, and once I realized that each letter plays a different song, I needed to hear them all.  Joey wasn’t in the mood to explore the songs and kept spinning the ball to make it reset to the default background music.  Eventually, because he wouldn’t get OFF it, I had to take the ball into the bathroom and close the door so I could hear all the songs without interruption.  You know you’re too involved with your child’s toys when you’re sitting on the sink, pressing letters on a toy ball while your child is clawing and whining at the door because mama took his toy, and all you can think is, “Jesus, gimmee a minute, I’m trying to do something!”

And then there’s the caterpillar that sounds things out when you press his legs.  Each leg makes a different letter sound, and you can press them to make it say words like C A T or B U G or D O G.  It didn’t take long for Eli and I to try to make it swear and that’s when we discovered that the caterpillar will not say inappropriate words.  It will not say S-H-I-T or F-U-C-K or D I C K.  When you get to the last letter, the caterpillar giggles, interrupting the flow so it sounds like FU-ha ha ha, that tickles-K.  The night we discovered the built-in censorship feature, we spent half an hour on the floor hovering over the caterpillar, busting out all our creativity to try and make the caterpillar say something bad.  I won’t tell you all the words we tested, because I’m sure you’re already thinking the worst and I don’t need to confirm that we are bad people by typing out the filth that exists in our minds.  But the final result is that we never did get it to say anything colorful.  And believe me when I say we tried everything.

We’ve had noisy toys in our house for over a year and we’ve never had to change a single battery.  Meanwhile, the vibrating bouncy chair my son spent the first three months of his life sleeping in, the thing that kept us from going over the edge from sleep deprivation, went through batteries like bad sushi through a colon.  We probably spent fifty bucks in batteries for that damn thing and it became such an essential part of caring for our baby that fresh batteries were right up there on the shopping list with formula and diapers.  I will never forget the morning of the ice storm, when I was trapped in the house with no backup voltage and the batteries started to die.  Every half hour or so when the chair would begin to slow, I’d have to smack the bottom of the battery chamber to get it to give just a little more juice.  By lunchtime, despite my smacking and pleading and finally just plain throwing the thing around the room, whaling on it in attempt to kick start the motor, the chair was dead and I spent the rest of the day with a screaming baby who wouldn’t nap because his body wasn’t vibrating.  Next time I’ll be looking into something with an AC adaptor.

Comments

[Toni]

I had the opposite problem. The batteries that all of my daughter's former toys required would cost me a fortune every year. Except one toy, which I "lost" the batteries to. My sister got my daughter this horse, made by Mattel, for Barbie, when she was 4. When you turned it on, it whinnied, and *WALKED*! I would have dreams that it would begin to walk in the middle of the night, eyes glowing red--even after the batteries were removed. Creepy as hell. One day it stopped working, and I was relieved. Now my problems with gifts for my daughter are much more simple--just to keep her out of clothes that make her look like a streetwalker. =) Happy Holidays.