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| Tudors R Us: The girls keep even their headless Barbies |
By Dad
Tired of our Manhattan apartment,* the girls have been asking how to get onto the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
I tell them we're more likely to star in Hoarders – and point to the piles of toys clogging up our abode.
Chucking anything bearing the kids' fingerprints always invites trouble. Major feelings are hurt if our trio catch me sneaking something of theirs into the garbage chute.
“I worked really hard on that," six-year-old Cathy says of anything I'm tossing that she's written or drawn.
We could be talking about a ballpoint-pen sketch of a stick person on dogeared paper torn from some long-discarded notebook: Cathy wants it kept.
Her sisters once raced to the garbage chute with my prized Churchill collection when they caught me trying to whittle down the number of plush toys all three keep in multiple space-consuming bins.
Little matter that some of the furry animals smelled like they'd been stored in the Parisian catacombs, so long had disuse denied them contact with fresh air.
At the chute, Dora (13) opened the intake door and yelled: "I mean it," as she dangled a volume of the History of the English Speaking Peoples to within a finger's slip of incineration.
Standing in the doorway, Penny (10) blocked my access to the threatened tome with all the determination of the Spartan 300 holding back the Persians at Thermopylae.
With neighbors beginning to crack open their doors to get a handle on the ruckus, surrender was my only option (this was not – to borrow from Churchill – my "finest hour").
The plush toys stash remains to this day.
Headless
As does just about everything else we've ever bought, including now broken toys.
Most puzzling is why the kids keep their headless Barbie dolls. The younger girls say they still play with them. Play at what? The Court of Henry VIII?
Parental-advice sites typically urge involving the children in any culling of their stuff. That debate would lead to history's longest-ever filibuster in our home.
Buying replacement stuff is no solution either. When Penny spotted a new lunch bag she liked, I bought it on condition she toss her old one, which had a broken zipper.
Penny agreed, and later swore she’d kept her side of the bargain. I later glimpsed the old bag “hidden” in one of her drawers. Watch this space for the day I confront her on that.
Buying replacement stuff is no solution either. When Penny spotted a new lunch bag she liked, I bought it on condition she toss her old one, which had a broken zipper.
Penny agreed, and later swore she’d kept her side of the bargain. I later glimpsed the old bag “hidden” in one of her drawers. Watch this space for the day I confront her on that.
So, for now, we’re stuck with a shrinking living space as “stuff” continues to consume the apartment. Now, where’s that number for the Hoarders show?
Either that, or we'll just move out and leave the apartment to the headless Barbies and stick people!
* Who wouldn't be tired of this place? It's on the Upper East Side at 10 minutes' walk from Central Park and 20 minutes' from the Metropolitan Museum; it has a roof garden, 24-hour doorman service and periodic parties in the entrance hall. Altogether untenable. And if you detect a note of sarcasm in this footnote, you're right on the money! How tired would they be if they were growing up in a British "council" house, with no indoor toilet, no TV until I they're 5, no refrigerator until they're 13, and certainly no heating in any room other than the living room? Yes, their Pop and millions like him suffered these deprivations, I tell the kids. So what do they say to that? "That was the olden days," they tell me. Case closed as far as they're concerned.
