Thomas the Train

As evidenced by the appalling lack of content on this blog, I've suffered from some writer's block of late. Every time I try to sit down and write something, it comes back to the same themes:  changes and what Mikey has been doing lately. How many times do you want to read about what Mikey is saying or doing (wow, he asks for biteymans, i.e. vitamins, now. Stop the presses!)?

Feeling like I've been saying the same trivial stuff over and over again made it hard to come out here and write another posting. That said, I'm going to give another go at it. Just call me the Brett Favre of the blogosphere.

Now, onward with the blogging.

Let's just be frank here. Thomas the Train owns me right now. Some of you may be familiar Thomas already. You may be haunted by the creepy disembodied face pasted to the front of a blue steam locomotive engine. His ghoulish leer and his staring eyes, the eyes of a madman, might haunt you like they haunt me. Somehow this little anthropomorphic train is hero to millions of toddlers, ehem, young train engineers.

Mikey is absolutely obsessed, and we hear "I wanna watch Thomas Train!" about 15 times a day.

This leads us into our first parenting trap:  the high price of licensed toys from your kid's flavor of the month cartoon character. I always swore to myself that I wouldn't become "that parent" dropping mad cash to plaster cartoon characters all over my child. I guess I should have known better. Mikey loves Thomas, so away we go to Babies R Us or Target to browse. I stroll the aisles, gaping in disbelief at the prices. Hot Wheel-sized engines can hit $20 each. Simple buildings are generally $40 and up.

 

Take a gander at this set. Sure, it looks cool. But is it $400A worth of cool?  

Welcome to parenting school. We have many years of Star Wars, Cars, Toy Story, Lego, and whatever other cute, must-have characters that the marketers cook up to hook our toddler and siphon our cash. Wish us luck.