barbie

Lowering My Standards One Toy Dog Poo At A Time

January 16, 2009 By Blonde Mom 8 Comments

I’m definitely no toy snob. If you look around our house you’ll find your various and sundry plastic toys: Polly Pocket and her microscopic stilettos, enough My Little Ponies to start a stampede, and your usual dollar store treasures and Happy Meal loot. We do have some nice wooden toys, but our toy collection will never be approved for a Montessori playroom.

Miss C did some pet sitting for our neighbor after Christmas and was paid with a Wal-Mart gift card. Just before school started back, in a post-holiday eggnog overdose induced fog of boredom and bad judgment, I told Miss C we’d head over to Wal-Mart with an exchange I needed to make and she could bring along her gift card and scope out the toys.

I guess I’ve never been brave, or stupid, enough to venture into Wal-Mart’s toy department a few weeks after Christmas, but entire sections of the shelves were nearly bare and not much was on sale. As we say in the South, the pickins were slim.

We circled back to the Barbie aisle and we spotted a Barbie and Tanner play set, otherwise known as Barbie and the dog who poops tiny brown pellets that unfortunately look just like Tic Tacs. Miss C loves her new Barbie and the pooping dog. It was toy karma, really. I mean she had just earned some spending money for pet sitting, and here was this poop scoopin’ Barbie.

Now if I can only teach our dogs to poop in little perfect cylindrical turds, just like Tanner. That would be a cool trick.

Filed Under: Parenting 8 Comments

Bad Santa

December 9, 2008 By Blonde Mom 7 Comments

Miss C asked Santa for a Bratz Kidz Ice Cream Maker Snow Village last year but strangely enough the elves ran out of them.

This year she’s still talking about the ice cream maker and since her belief in Santa lies precariously in the balance, I asked Santa to pimp, I mean, pony up. Thankfully the ice cream maker doesn’t come with a hot tub or a Bratz dude masseuse doll to help work out those sore post skiing muscles.

I don’t really have an all out ban on Bratz products, but we don’t have any Bratz dolls in the house as we’ve conveniently avoided them. I do think the Bratz dolls look like mini strippers, though, so I’m quite content that Miss C enjoys playing with her Barbies. The Barbie movies are inspiring and full of girl power and lovely classical music tracks. Barbie also has high career aspirations. She’s been a poop scooper, a veterinarian, and a teacher. The Bratz? Their claim to fame is Botoxed lips that need their own zip code, a wardrobe that is the envy of the Pussycat Dolls, and I suspect they have mad pole dancing skills.

The dilemma is Miss C is at that age where she’s going to start the downhill slippery slope to disbelief in Santa. She’s already been asking me very pointed questions about how Santa does the whole travel around the world deliver gifts to children thing and why there are different Santas on duty each year. I know how her mind works and she will be crushed if she doesn’t see the Bratz ice cream maker under the tree in a few weeks. Because her request is more about a girly ice cream maker, than a Bratz doll, I’d been leaning toward finally making her Christmas wish come true. Plus the Bratz Kidz line seems like a kinder, gentler, less sluttier version of the grown up Bratz dolls. Since there will be a halt on future Bratz, perhaps this will be an heirloom to pass on to another generation. I mean who needs another Madame Alexander doll?

Last weekend after a bedtime story we were talking about Christmas and Miss C’s eyes got wide and she said very seriously, “Mommy, you know what I want for Christmas?”

I braced myself. I knew she was going to talk about the ice cream maker. AGAIN.

“A trampoline!”

Trampoline…one word guaranteed to strike fear in the most neurotic of mothers who envisions taking her child to the ER.

That was the clincher. I couldn’t get to my laptop fast enough to bid on, and win, a Bratz Kidz ice cream maker snow village on ebay last night. Thankfully the doll that comes with it is fully clothed.

Does anyone have a number for a Bratz hit man? This doll has a lot of pressure on her to be on her best behavior, otherwise she may disappear.

Filed Under: My Girls, Parenting 7 Comments

My Little Pony, My Hellish Pony

January 31, 2008 By Blonde Mom 21 Comments

If you’re in an unusually jovial mood one cold, Friday afternoon after school and you let your 5-year-old daughter select not one, but three, DVDs at your friendly neighborhood Hollywood Video for a five-night rental because the forecast looks glum for the duration, stop yourself and for the love of all that is good and holy do not come home with this:

Otherwise, be prepared to have an unexplainable urge to gouge your eyeballs out until this horrific example of animated nightmarishness has been returned to the movie rental place where some other poor unsuspecting parent ~~sucker~~ agrees to pluck it down from the shelf for their child. For all of you high-brow intellectual parents out there who would never rent a My Little Pony DVD, just imagine getting really drunk and then trapped inside one of those scam crane arcade machines that taunt you with the challenge of winning a cheap stuffed animal while listening to circus music full blast. You know if you were only six inches tall. Or something like that.

Ironically the My Little Pony line of toys are among Miss C’s favorites and I don’t mind the general brigade of pastel ponies at all because coming up with all sorts of Ponyland melodramas occupies her for quite some time. Just don’t play the My Little Pony theme song more than once or I might have to hurt you.

The only other animated series that I can think holds a stinky candle to this is the Hello Kitty series. Seriously, one round with either the My Little Pony or Hello Kitty animated idiocy and you’ll be kissing Dora’s feet. Vive la Dora!

My nominees for surprisingly good animated kid movies of the girly persuasion, besides Disney, (obviously Disney is doing OK without any endorsements from me and we own several classic Disney movies), goes to the Barbie movies. Pixar caliber they are most definitely not, but I’ll take Barbie dancing to Swan Lake over annoying pastel flying ponies and horrific plot lines any day. I’m a sucker for classical music and the classic boy meets girl, girl meets boy, girl must overcome scary scumbag witchy woman and flex her girl power muscles story line any day.

Anyone else care to nominate the worst kid DVDs?