War on Stuffed Animals; Want to be on my side?

English: Stuffed animals. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I love toys, I love buying my kids toys. Perhaps I didn’t have enough toys as a child. Perhaps I never really grew up. All of the above? What I hate is (a) cleaning the playroom; (b) selecting some of these toys to get rid of; and (3) stuffed animals. They are cute and cuddly, well some of them, some are downright creepy and except for the 1 out of 50 that my child latches on to as his sleeping mate, 28 months into this whole gig I’m still trying to figure out their purpose. There’s just something about stuffed animals that makes people want to buy them for babies and toddlers. Maybe they think they’re a safe bet, like they can’t grow out of them and what are the chances someone else will get the same one. Before you buy someone a stuffed animal, it’s important to ask yourself this, when will the child play with this? In what situation would they play with this? If you’re inquiring about my child the answer is NONE. Perhaps he will go through a stuffed animal stage at some point or maybe his baby sister will, if they’re lucky I will not have purged them all beforehand. They are not small toys, they take up mountains of space and aren’t particularly easy to arrange in attractive displays. Further, they are one of the first things to be destroyed by the tiny humans, diving through the lot of them, throwing them everywhere, then never touching them again until my OCD kicks in and I have to fix them into something mildly attractive only for the whole nasty cycle to repeat itself. Also they should never be passed down, used stuffed animals, that’s just gross, I can’t even begin to imagine what germy nasty things grow in stuffed animals. All that cotton, kids chewing on them, spilling stuff, coughing, sneezing, I’m feeling a bit nauseous just think about it. Do people routinely wash their stuffed animals? I sure don’t. Perhaps if I lobby the CDC they will declare them unsafe for our health and well-being and require an immediate evacuation of all stuffed animals from the Country?

For all of the above reasons, I’d like to declare a war against stuffed animals and their manufacturers.  We could deliver the world’s stuffed animals back to the facilities they came from, no refund required. Surely there’s enough that such a large delivery of stuffed animals, which may or may not be disease ridden plush, would cease operations if not destroy the place with their loads of cotton filled cuteness  (gag) and equal parts Ebola until they could come up with something better to manufacture. I mean it’s just an idea, I’m open to other suggestions.

 

In the meantime, think how clean our playrooms would look, briefly  momentarily for about a second.

 

 

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• Activity #197: Send your used stuffed animals to Afghanistan (rookiemoms.com)