Toys

So yesterday I kept two children ages 3 and 6 months...along with my 2 year old and 1 year old it was a bit crazy!! The 3 year old boy kept pulling toys out of our toy box and saying "oh no...what's wrong with this?!" where I would proceed to tell him "it's broken..." I realized that so many of our toys were broken, and so I got that whole "I'm a bad mom because..." thought, realizing that my kids didn't have any nice toys.

Then, last night, I asked Blu for an idea for a Zambian story for my blog. He said "why don't you tell them about the toys the kids played with in Zambia?" OUCH GOD! What a smack in the face!!

In Zambia, every child has a soccer ball. This consists of "Walmart bags" (there called Shoprite bags) wadded together methodically and secured with tape. These balls were sturdy and the kids could play soccer for hours with them!

We also saw children flying kites quite frequently. These were also made out of Shoprite sacks, wooden sticks, and string. Kids would also roll tires down the road with a stick for hours of entertainment.

My favorite toys were little cars that were made out of wire. Kids used things like plastic milk lids for the wheels, and then they built a huge car contraption around it. It would even have a little steering wheel, and it had a long wire that would come up to their hand so they could drive their car everywhere. This is the closest most of them would ever get to owning a car.

Kids would dig in our trash bin when we weren't looking and pull out things like tuna fish cans to use as "toys."

So some of my kids toys are broken...some of the batteries don't work...oh how we Americans "suffer." Shame on me.