Every Christmas and birthday, Lily receives a gift. You know the gift. That one that keeps on giving and giving and giving until you are ready to kill somebody. The noise makers that become the child's favorite toy and the parent's nightmare. This year it was the Merry-Okee. What pray tell, you ask, is a Merry-Okee. It is a device designed to make your eardrums bleed, or a karaoke microphone with four buttons: one for playing pre-recorded Christmas carols, one for turning the singer's voice into a high-pitch, squeaky elf-like voice, one to sing without the elf voice, and the on-off button.
At first glance, this sounds like fun. Trust me, it's only fun for the child singing at the top of their lungs. As she screeches into the microphone, there is that sound you get when a speaker is being blown out combined with the high-pitched elf voice and the completely off-key child voice. Tone deaf or perfect pitch, your ears are sure to bleed. After a few minutes of this, the long suffering parent (that would be me) is ready to start a witch hunt for the creators of this torture device. Or just snatch that damn thing out of the child's hand and throw it under a Euk tire. Darn! Smashed to smithereens. Of course, I don't, but it's so tempting.
When she was younger, I just waited until she was asleep or out of the house and removed the batteries. Now she's too smart for that. She just asks me to replace the batteries. Since she knows where we keep them, I can't say that we don't have any. Hm... unless I hide them. But if I do that, I am likely to forget where they are when I need them.
For her birthday, one of her friends got her a robotic pterodactyl that spits its food (thankfully, not real food, but a plastic projectile) and screeches. It also snaps its mouth shut. O.o The young boy who bought it for her knows that she loves dinosaurs, so it was a very thoughtful gift... for her. For me, not so much. She pulled it out again the other day and played with it. It was...special. (g)
One of the worst toys, though, that someone gave her was a singing Pinkie Pie. God, how I hate My Little Ponies with their stupid stereotype crap that girls are supposed to like. (Ponies wearing dresses. Really?) But to have to listen to that annoying voice sing one of three insipid songs every day for four hours out of the day is enough to send someone around the bend. Just. Kill. Me. Now. Seriously, instead of water boarding, they should make prisoners listen to Pinkie Pie sing. They'd crack quicker than a peanut in a nutcracker.
You know, there must be a special kind of hell for the people who make these toys. If there's not, there is no justice in this world.
16 comments:
For Christmas this year, I thought a nice compromise (as far as noisy toys go) would be light sabers for my 4 and 7 year old boys. I bought each of them one so that they could play together with them. We all know that light sabers make a swooshing sound and it's not that bad. I figured they'd get a neat light saber toy because they both really love Star Wars and they'd also get a noise maker that wasn't so horrible to parents ears. It was a real hit! They love those light sabers...then my parents go buy one of the boys a drum set and the others a guitar...*sigh*...So much for compromise!
I'm serious when I say that it has to be a man who invents these toys. There is no way a woman who has been around children would ever ever place this kind of pain in the world.
I tolerated the Merry Okee for three days, then hid it when youngling went to bed. He's forgotten all about it, and I'll pull it out again next Christmas....and send him back to Grandma's with it. After all, she bought the damn thing;)
Rhiannon,
That gift was from my mom. Obviously, she wanted to pay me back. For what? I'm not sure, as I was the perfect angel. (g)
Bri,
It has to be. They have some deep-seated aggression towards mothers. Or perhaps it's people smoking pot or on drugs who come up with these ideas. (g) These are the kinds of toys only someone on something would find funny...beyond children, that is. (g)
Kenzie,
She manages to put it somewhere I can't find. That's not hard to do in her hit by a cyclone room. (g)
Marci
Very funny post! I went for the light sabers as well - one for my son and one for my daughter - so they could fight each other and the sound is sort of pleasant to the ear. But as someone else said, after the first day or so, they both tired of them and that was, like, fifty bucks down the drain!
Patti
Patti,
I could only wish they'd lose interest so quickly. Unfortunately, there is something about microphones and children that is a fatal attraction... fatal for my ears. (g)
I'm glad you enjoyed the post. :)
Oh Marci, I think we all feel you pain!
Stupid, freeakin, noisy, toys spawned by the devil!! They are evil and are designed to drive us to commit evil acts of violence and torture!?
Do you recall that kind of garden ornament that would detect movement and play a sound? If it was a bird it would make a creeping sound, if it was a frog it would croak. I think we need to line a hundred of those along the front path to the house of the people who give our children these noisy toys of evilness .... But we need a zombie one with terrifying groans and howls ... a hundred of them...
Rhiannon ..... I want light sabers!! I could take them to my Filipino stick fighting class and we could have some serious fun. (no I bloody well will NOT grow up!!)
Silly Sand. If you don't know what it is, it's this sand that sticks together while underwater, but that is magically dry the instant you remove it from the water. I'm sure there is some physics lesson there somewhere, but as far as I'm concerned, it's magic, and as far as my three yr old daughter was concerned when she received it, it was pink and nicely covered every inch of the kitchen table in a thin layer of...well, pink sand. Grrrr......
But I'll tell you where the justice is, Marci. The uncle who gave this gift to her ( my younger brother) just had his first child. *innocent*
In the words of Inago Montoya, "There will be blood tonight!" or silly sand retribution. Six of one....
I've been lucky in that my kids had few noise-maker toys. Heck, Wee Man makes enough noise as he plays with his Monster Jam trucks that you'd think you truly were in a civic center with Grave Digger and Medusa.
I used to love MLP, but they've completely bastardized it with all the frilly accessories. I can't speak to the rest, having no kids myself, but I can imagine your pain. Try putting the batteries on top of the fridge? ;)
And when they get older they get things like an electric violin, which is nothing like playing a regular one.
My 17 year old daughter decided she was going to play The Devil Came Down to Georgia on it--a piece she has yet to master no her regular violin.
Three weeks of Charley Daniels band screeching out of her room--I like the song but not 3 hours straight while she tries to learn to play this dang thing.
So getting older means nothing.
I will never complain about 3 hr practice sessions with the standard violin again!
My sensory deprivation ear buds are my best friend these days.
I'll have to check with Dante and see which of the 9 levels of hell this qualifies for. I'd guess a 2. Funny post, Marci. Why are parenting stories funny when it's not your kid? When my in laws bought my sons noisy toys, we tactfully suggested they keep them at their house. Funny how they stopped buying noisy toys=)
Terri
Robyn,
I don't remember those. Perhaps I was blessed and never encountered them. (And I hope that remains true. grin) I'm okay with not growing up. Being young is fun. (g)
HAHAHAHAHA, Jaime! I don't know Silly Sand. I will gladly forgo ever knowing Silly Sand, although I don't believe it's any worse than glitter. The little girls love decorating their pictures with it. And once you let that stuff loose, it gets everywhere. I'm sure there's even a speck of it on my butt. (g)
I'm so jealous, Faith. That's just unfair. Next Christmas, I'll send Wee Man a noisemaker. Then you can experience the "joy" the rest of us do. (g)
She'd find them, Brianna, but I wouldn't. HAHAHAHAHA That's just how it works. I'm sure she'd pull out the stepladder and that would be it. Good suggestion, though. Yes, it seems they've ruined most of the decent cartoons, although I was never into MLP.
Well, Shawn, Charlie plays the drums. Lily is learning to play them. That being said, yeah, I think violin of any kind when not well played trumps the drums. I feel for you, truly.
Terri, there isn't a level in Dante's hell bad enough in for these people. (g) I'm glad you enjoyed the post. :)
For years my unmarried, childless brother bought guns (he knows how I dislike guns of any kind!) for my three little boys...the kind that vibrate, flash lights, make screeching sounds like a bomb is flying through the air, and explosion sounds, like when the bomb hits its target. The boys were delighted...me, not so much. I offered to call him at 2am, so the boys could thank him for his new presents.
Now that all of the kids are adults, brother is still childless, so I've never had my revenge. But sooner or later the kids will make me a gramma, and I can hardly wait to find something noisy to gift to their wee ones!
My mother is an artist and musician. Since I've only got one or two of her handy talent chromosomes on my DNA, she felt it necessary to bestow my kids with the gifts I didn't feel compelled to give them. Finger paints...check. Noisy musical instruments...the kind that need eight D cell batteries...check. Plus all sorts of gadgets and gizmos that make noise and light up...gawd.
So I have no kids, so you would think I don't understand this, but I do. You see, when you get a dog who takes CARE Of his toys, the same thing can happen. My lab, when he was younger, loved noisemaking toys, and never ever destroyed them. One christmas I thought it was cute to get him the snowman stuffed toy that played jinglebells. By june I had added my very own words to it:
Jingle Bells, Blackjack Smells
That danged toy is driving me insane!
Oh what fun it's gonna be
when I flush that thing away!
Hey!
Oh yes, 10 years later, I still remember the words. LOL. I think my husband got fed up and threw it out one day, cuz one day it just up'd and disappeared. I didn't ask about it, because I might feel guilty and go find the toy and give it back to him when he got morose and started looking for it. I figured what I didn't know..... LOL
Luckily or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, when we got the next dog and brought him home he was a complete "el destructo dog" which means the new dog destroyed every noise making toy in under 2 minutes
flat.
Then, alas, I discovered what we now fondly call "Squeaky toy" which is a rubber squeak toy that he hasn't destroyed. For four years we've been hearing THAT one, and it's loud enough that the first time I squeaked it at home I hid it for more than a year! LOL.
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