Tag: fisher price

Mega Blok Party.

Published on by Darlene Dee9 Comments

Babystar’s favorite game lately is called BUILD A TOWER SO TALL TO THE SKY.

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I have to use all caps so you can understand how to correctly pronounce the title of this game.

She has been playing this game with her very light foam blocks or her square wooden alphabet blocks with varying degrees of success.

But now we have over 500 Fisher Price Mega Bloks. ($63.56 with tax.)

This happened slowly. I innocently bought the 120-piece Treehouse Playdate pack of Mega Bloks for $14.99 from Costco one day. ($15.89 with tax.)

We came home and opened the box and built the tallest tower ever. It was taller than Babystar!!

I did some googling and realized that 120 blocks for $15 was a really good deal. The basic 80-piece pack is anywhere from $20 to $26 depending where you look. Unless you want the pink 80-piece set, which is mysteriously $14.99. I have found the exception to the Pink Tax. (Well, Mega Bloks and car insurance.)

I picked up another set the next time I was at Costco.

We really like the Mega Bloks. They are perfect for my toddler. They are basically Legos-in-Training. I know, I know, I totally love Duplos. But Duplos need a lot of snapping and pulling apart. The Mega Bloks just sort of sit on top of one another. And the protruding parts that fit inside the bottoms of the blocks are nice and big. This means they do not topple easily. Which is GREAT for my easily frustrated, poor-impulse-control-having, two year old ToddlerMonster when she is trying to build her TOWER SO TALL TO THE SKY.

(The set comes with stickers to make some of the blocks look like leaves or branches or whatever, but we threw those away. I personally think that stickers on blocks limit imagination, but you do you, boo.)

During a recent toy purge, I gave away the small set of Green Toys blocks that she had and never played with, along with a ton of other infant toys. This left an entire ottoman downstairs empty for Mega Bloks.

So I totally bought two more boxes of blocks. Fun fact: only three boxes will fit in the ottoman so one is still unopened just WAITING for one of her friends to have a birthday party. Or for us to get bigger ottomans, whichever happens first.

RAISING BABYSTAR: $22,723.14

Dear Fisher Price: Thanks, Boo.

Published on by Darlene Dee6 Comments

Babystar received some really excellent gifts for her birthday last June. I didn’t list them here because of course I didn’t BUY them, but she was a very lucky little two-year-old. (In fact, she got so many great presents that I immediately packed a few of them away so she could have new toys this fall. #momhack)

One of her favorite new toys is her vintage-inspired Fisher-Price cash register. These days she mostly enjoys popping in the coins and pushing the buttons, but I can see the potential for plenty of imaginary play in the future. Every single kid that comes over to play gravitates to that cash register. All of them. And some of the adults.


By mid-July, we were down to two coins. (The cash register comes with six.) No one was surprised. The ToddlerMonster relocates things like its her job. Every kid that comes over fights over plays with this toy. PLUS the new kitten is obsessed with the coins. I have literally seen her reach her little paw into the drawer and bat out a plastic coin and then carry it away in her mouth. 


After a bit of googling and searching the Fisher-Price website and eBay, I realized that I could not purchase replacement coins. Huge bummer. (Really, Fisher-Price, you should get on this.)

I emailed Fisher-Price asking if there was any way they could sell me some additional plastic coins. They wrote back that they were very sorry that they did not offer the coins for sale and they sent me a $25 gift certificate for anything Fisher-Price! (Or Mattel, or Hot Wheels, (but not American Girl), but LIKE WHOA SO NICE!)

I didn’t have to provide proof of purchase or anything, which is good, since the cash register was a gift. So, um, live your life however you like. But just know that you can email Fisher-Price about your cash register coins and they might send you a gift certificate for a free toy.

I’m actually not trying to help the world defraud Fisher-Price. I really just want them to manufacture and sell packs of replacement / additional coins for this super cool cash register!! But I can’t control other people. Yet. 

I couldn’t use the voucher online and it was a pain to use at Target, but the Target cashier eventually overrode something and made it work. Babystar chose a $14.99 “iPad”, and I didn’t get any cash back or anything. But hey! FREE TOY!

 

Babystar loves her iPad and keeps it by the bed with a pile of books. Most mornings she will play with the iPad and read books and drink her Unicorn Water while I have my coffee. WHICH IS AMAZING SHE TOTALLY WINS TODDLER OF THE YEAR. At least in our house, where the competition is admittedly slim.

PLUS, once we figured out that the CAT was losing the coins and not the BABY, we had a better idea of where to look. The current coin total is five but it fluctuates daily. 

RAISING BABYSTAR: $21,140.26

 

Ponies and Cars and Ponies and Ponies.

Published on by Darlene Dee1 Comment

And a school. And some more stuff.

Last Saturday, I worked a booth selling donated books and games at a flea market to raise money for the Organization for Autism Research.

April is Autism Awareness Month. Almost everyone has heard of Autism Speaks and Light It Up Blue, which is cool, but if you dig deeper, Autism Speaks spends a lot of their money trying to find a ’cause’ or a ‘cure’ for autism. (Hint: it is not vaccines.) There are other organizations that spend more time and money advocating for those with autism and helping families with important resources. OAR is the latter, and I heart them for it. I digress.

I didn’t even LOOK at the other vendors until the ToddlerMonster came to visit. She wanted to walk around. Well, really she wanted to run but we compromised.

We came home with a vintage Fisher Price airplane ($10), schoolhouse ($10) and dollhouse ($5, not pictured because I think it is still in the van) that all need a good cleaning. (These might really be for me, but I pretend they are for Babystar. Or maybe the other way around? I think I need to do a post on ALL of the vintage Fisher Price I have acquired since Babystar’s birth…)


We also found other cheaper plastic airplanes for one dollar each ($4) and a yellow bouncy ball (free) and some old Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars ($5) and a stuffed penguin ($1) and like a million PONIES ($1). I only had one dollar left and Babystar kept pulling tiny ponies out of a giant bin of plastic toys and screeching in joy and hugging them so the girl selling them insisted that we take as many as we could find for that dollar. (I also bought a chair for myself from her mother so I don’t think we used Babystar’s cuteness to take advantage of them. Too much.)


RAISING BABYSTAR: $16,003.94

 

Ballin’.

Published on by Darlene Dee1 Comment

Once upon a time my little brother brought a slide into my living room for Babystar. Last month, he added a ball pit. It is her favorite thing ever. She plays in the ball pit every day. Her snowman plays in the ball pit. Her dinosaur plays in the ball pit. Her babies play in the ball pit. Errybody plays in the ball pit.

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It used to belong to her cousin V, and some of the balls were crushed in the past two years. Babystar has upped her stunt game to include diving head first into the ball pit, so we decided to Amazon Prime a few more balls for some extra cushioning. $38.16 for two packs of 250 Fisher Price balls.

Guess who stopped by when there happened to be a giant Amazon box on the front porch? Yes, the awesome uncle who makes ball pits appear in the living room as if by magic brought the box in with him. Of course I had to let him dump all the new balls in the ball pit for Babystar. She stared up at him with so much joy. I think she likes him better than me now. I think she likes him better than PENGUINS now.

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Babystar looks like a little turtle swimming in all those balls with just her head popping up. The new balls were smaller than the original ones, which actually makes for a nice mix. After two days of picking up ballsballsballs and putting them back in the ball pit, I took some out and hid them in a closet downstairs. She didn’t even notice, and now we have backup for when some of these get squished or lost or whatever happens to small plastic balls in this big scary world.

RAISING BABYSTAR: $14,263.39

Treasure Hunting.

Published on by Darlene DeeLeave a comment

Our weekend road trip left us with a large chunk of down time in the middle of nowhere.

(PS I love the middle of nowhere. All the nowheres. I like it when my soul can spread out.)

We went treasure hunting in antique shops. I was looking for vintage Fisher Price toys for Babystar and old cool looking cameras for Miss Teen USA. I found a few things, including some toys for the small one. All of these will be hers after some cleaning. I think the best score was that Fisher Price airplane for $4. Also, one of those plastic baggies has an old FP car inside. I’m sorry, I mean a vintage FP car.

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I spent $26.30 for toys she will probably hate. But it was fun! Look — Smurfs and Weebles! (“Smurfs and what, Mom? Where’s my iPad?”)

RAISING BABYSTAR: $6,307.53

Spoiler Alert. I have been playing with eBay since we came home. Whoops. The mail should be fun soon.