Back Then, I Had to Walk Ten Miles to School, In The Snow, Uphill Both Ways...

First off - Congratulations Ellie! You won the purse prize! Please contact me at leslie@leslielangtry.com and I'll ship it off to you!

During break, we took our kids to Chicago for a few days with friends and their kids to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry, the Sears Tower, etc. It was blisteringly cold in the Windy City, but a good time was had by all. Well, the kids had a good time. The adults were sleep-deprived and sore, but that's just splitting hairs, really.

Anyway, one of the exhibits in the Sears Tower (the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, thank you very much) really caught my eye. You can see from the photo above (click on it to make it larger): It says, "Interactive toys of 1793," and it features a stick, some frogs (badly photoshopped in, by the way) and a leaf or two.

Of course, the four worldly children, aged 7 to 9 were NOT impressed. They couldn't figure out why I was even taking a picture of it. They just went back to using my cell phone to call their friends and using their digital cameras to take pictures of the skyline. But I stood there and stared at that for several minutes. In fact, I was there so long my husband thought I was having a stroke - but that's beside the point.

On the way home, as my children texted each other from their Nintendo DS (while sitting next to each other) and talked about playing Guitar Hero III when they got home, it really hit me that A)My kids didn't appreciate history or B) I appreciated it a little too much.

Now, I didn't grow up with sticks and frogs as my only interactive toys (although there was that one time with the grasshopper that kept me amused for say, oh, minutes). We had Simon, Intellivision and Atari, Baby Alive (a very, creepy Terminator version where the metal skull seemed to press against the rubber skin and make mechanical gnashing sounds while she ate), banana-seat bicycles, etc. But toys were still dramatically different.

My mom's gonna read this and tell me how she just had a jumprope, and I'll bet you someone will e-mail me about being excited to get an orange and a lard sandwhich for Christmas, but I'm trying to put this all into perspective.

Of course toys change with technology and things are different than they were 200+ years ago. But all I can think about is some child back then getting as much joy out of that stick as my daughter got out of her Hannah Montana stage - complete with real light shows and music. It just made me wonder how my kids would fare in a third world country where they still play with those kinds of things. Then I realized that I would also have to be in that third world country with them and that kind of cancelled the idea out.

I don't really have any answers - just observations at this point. I think I'm gonna start dvr-ing National Geographic Channel's Tribal Life and forcing the kids ala-Clockwork Orange-style to watch it.

What do you think?

"The Assassin"