Makin' things with light

Thanks to a question on Cash Cab this evening, Noel and I amused our children briefly with a duet version of the Lite-Brite theme song: "Lite Brite! Makin' things with liiiiight ... What a sight, makin' things with Lite Brite!"

Lite Brite is one of those Generation X toys that people my age remember fondly.  Some of them I never owned, but I can't deny that we owned a Lite Brite.  I dutifully made all the the designs that came with it -- you may recall that they were printed on black paper which you inserted behind the pegboard, and when you put the peg in you actually punctured the paper.

You also got blank sheets of black paper on which you could make your own designs.  I remember making title cards for the puppet shows that my brother and I put on for the family.  And if I'm not mistaken, we managed to hold onto our Lite Brite long enough to lose some significant number of the colored pegs that came with it, necessitating the buying of a replacement pack.

Do you have any Lite Brite memories?  Original Lite Brite or later-generation variants are both acceptable.

A snap -- really

This is a love letter to a product.  I'm not a compensated endorser -- just a happy customer.

When I heard that Noel had put an electronics project kit on Archer's Amazon wishlist, I was dubious.  I pictured a box full of wires and diodes and resistors, tiny parts that would get lost and break, the risk of injury.

Archer opened the kit Christmas morning, courtesy of his aunt and uncle in Nashville.  It was clearly something he was drawn to; "100 Exciting Projects!" he read with stirring inflection off the box.  And he could barely wait to get everything out of his stocking and be done with presents so that he could study the instruction manual.

To my surprise, this Elenco Snap Circuits system was nothing like what I had pictured.  The components were sturdy and modular, designed to fit on a thick plastic grid.  They snapped together like snaps on clothing, with no little wires or tenuous connections.  Everything was labeled and easy to identify.  And because the large grid keeps everything in order, recreating the configurations in the project book is easy.

In fact, Cady Gray took to it as quickly as Archer.  The two of them have been snapping and unsnapping, testing, reconfiguring, and explaining their creations to us ever since.  And I've been marveling at how well designed this kit is and scheming to get the kids more of the same.

Doll house

Little girls are supposed to play with dolls. But I don't remember doing that. I had dolls, of course. The ones I remember best were the ones that relatives and friends brought me back from overseas trips as presents. They weren't meant to be played with; they were meant to be looked at, and I lay in bed and stared at them sitting on a display shelf for hours. The one I remember best was from Japan, dressed in a beautiful and intricate kimono. She was posed on a stand and could not be moved.

Also on that shelf was a Madame Alexander Alice in Wonderland doll. I can see every detail of it now -- the blue dress, the white apron, the puff sleeves, the headband. Again, she was not meant for play.

I had Barbies, too -- a Barbie and a Skipper. My grandmother made lots of clothes for me in elementary school, and she used scraps of the same fabric to make matching clothes for my Barbies. I can't remember acting out any scenarios with them ... can't remember styling their hair or dressing them. It seems to me that I was hyperaware as a child of the expectation to play with dolls, and completely confused about how to do it.

So as I watch my daughter, thrilled with her new knitted dolls, insist on arranging them on her bed, take them to school, and sleep with them in her arms, I wonder what she's experiencing. So much of her personality and activity relates to typical girlishness. And because I don't think of myself at that age as girly or typical -- because in some ways she's defying those stereotypes as well -- I can't quite imagine what drives her to squee over her dolls, hug them tight, and share them proudly her friends.

Christmas haul: A critical review

We took some chances this year on gifts for the kids, and I think we hit the jackpot. After playtesting some of the items this afternoon, here's a brief report of our experience.

Quirkle

This domino-esque tile game was the first one Cady Gray wanted to play. You play tiles in lines that have one of two attributes in common: either the same shape (of six possible), or the same color (of six possible). There's only about one page of instructions, and a helpful diagram of a sample game. We played without keeping track of points, but the kids caught on to the high-scoring moves (play tiles that count in more than one line, complete a set of six and earn a bonus) very quickly.

I love a lot of things about this game. There's no board, just a bag of tiles (substantial, brightly-colored, and well-made). Strategy is important but not complicated. Scoring is intuitive. In short, it's the perfect game for a range of ages. Both the five-year-old and the eight-year-old were competitive with me almost immediately. (I started off playing with Cady Gray while Archer was immersed in his favorite gift -- a handheld electronic chess game -- but after fifteen minutes he wandered over and started pestering me about playing the next game.) This one's going to have good staying power.

Doodle Dice

Another game whose easily-grasped rules makes it playable for a wide range of ages. In a Yahtzee-esque setup, the player rolls six dice, each with six simple symbols (angle, curve, line, squiggle, face, dot), and has three tries to match one of the figures on the "gallery" of cards that have been played. There are six colors of cards, each corresponding to a figure that takes one to six dice to complete. Your object is to match a figure from each color of card, thereby collecting that card and completing your set.

Like Quirkle, this is all about seeing spatial relationships and exercising foresight. Like Quirkle, there are no words or role-playing to get in the way of the pure challenge. And like Quirkle, the game is accessible from kindergarten-age through adults. It doesn't take very long, either. We were playing within five minutes of opening the box -- again, there's only one brief page of rules. Fun and addictive.

Monopoly Electronic Banking Edition

We knew Archer would be delighted by the chance to use ATM-style debit cards to keep track of his net worth in his updated Monopoly, but I've been hesitant to jump into Monopoly with him, quite frankly. It's long and relatively complicated, what with having to decide when to buy houses and mortgage properties. But I was surprised at how much he started enjoying himself right away. One of the only pieces of strategy I proffered was that he should buy up as many properties as possible at the beginning so they could start earning money for him; he immediately grasped it and was a super-mogul by the second time around the board. (He ended up schooling me in our first game, and not because I was hanging back, either.)

The amounts of money are ramped up in his edition -- the fact that you get $2 million for passing Go should give you an idea of the inflation rate. And the properties are famous landmarks all over the world. (I enjoyed collecting the Gateway Arch, Disney World, and the Grand Ole Opry.) But the only difference in game play is how you keep track of the money. Each player has a card, and there's a banking machine. All cards start off with $15 million. If you have to pay, put your card in the side with the minus sign, and enter the amount in either K or M (thousands or millions). If you're being paid, put your card in the plus sign side and do the same thing. And if you're paying another player, put both cards in on the appropriate side, type in the amount, and it transfers.

The real drawback here is that you have to put your card in the machine to see how much money you have. I found myself asking Archer frequently (he was operating the machine, naturally, and usually he remembered from the last time he'd inserted my card). It might be helpful for everyone to keep their latest balance jotted down on scratch paper as they play.

But I found this a faithful rendition of a classic, with a numerical/electronic component that's tailor-made to delight my number/calculator/ATM/money-obsessed autist. His sister came in near the end-game and asked (characteristically) whether she could be the banker "but not play" next time.

Trios Kings Castle

I'm really happy about the way this one worked out. Stuck about a week before Christmas with nothing for pretend-play to put under the tree, I steered Noel toward Trios (which I'd wanted to get for CG's birthday, but didn't manage to procure). He got this castle building set, and spent a couple of happy hours this afternoon putting it together with her. (She enthusiastically adopted his motto for how to tell if the pieces had locked together firmly: "A satisfying snap!"). I was amazed at how big it turned out to be. There are quite a few figures and accessories, and as soon as it was together (CG was able to handle much of the construction solo, with Dad assisting when modules had to be combined), she started having the dragon-catapult attack and putting the little minifig-like knights into single combat or having them man the cannon and crossbow.

There are several other suggestions for ways to combine the building pieces to make different varieties of castles and towers. I was hoping that a Trios set would combine CG's pride in creative construction with her love of role-playing. From her happy embrace of the set this afternoon, I think I was right.

The pictures take me take me

While I was helping with her pajamas, my daughter read me a clever picture book called The Pencil, in which a pencil draws a whole village but has to contend with an overzealous eraser he draws to rub out some mistakes.

The story reminded me of my longtime fascination with stories in which a world is drawn. There's Harold and the Purple Crayon, of course. And there's "Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings," which aired on Captain Kangaroo in the seventies. At a farther remove, there's the very strange Mike Myers parody of "Simon" that appeared on Saturday Night Live in the early nineties; although the theme song claimed "I like to do draw-rings!", all Simon ever did was sit in the bathtub.

By far my strongest association with this world-creating impulse is the book Trash Can Toys and Games by Leonard Todd. I had this book as an adolescent, and I'll never forget its corrugated cardboard cover. It was good for hours of dreaming about making Aztec idols out of paperboard and caterpillars out of egg cartons.

There was one huge layout made out of Clorox bottles and milk jugs -- a space station complete with spool-and-marble astronauts and dishwashing liquid container rockets. I stared at it for ages, thinking about how to gather enough trash to recreate it, and despairing of ever making anything as perfect as portrayed in the book.

It's the scale and success of these sketched or constructed worlds that paralyzed me as a child. I frequently sat down with my Lego sets with the intention of building an entire city. But it never emerged the way I saw it in my head, and rather than just going with the flow and accident of the moment, I usually gave up amid a vague feeling of inferiority and dissatisfaction.

And I must admit that when I suggest large creative projects to my children -- to build a city with their blocks, or write and draw a story in their notebooks -- I worry that I'm setting them up for the same sense of inadequacy. Cady Gray seems unbothered by the pictures of Tinkertoy machines or Lego dwellings on the outside of her toy containers, and Archer appears quite up to the task of writing and illustrating complex creations (at least when the subject matter meshes with his obsessions). If I bought them a book like I had when I was a kid, intended to spark their imaginations, would it stifle and disappoint them instead?

Prize inside

Noel gets a lot of pre-release and new-release DVDs these days because he's writing a DVD roundup column weekly for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. Some of them come in elaborate packaging designed to catch the eyes of jaded journalists, like the huge When We Left Earth box we got this week with a cardboard nosecone inside holding the DVDs.

And some come with premiums: the Gossip Girl first season ice cream scoop, the Deal green eyeshade, the Fringe voice recorder with a cryptic dictated message about paranormal phenomena.

Best of all are the children's DVDs, which not only provide our kids with hours of entertainment courtesy of Scholastic or Children's Television Workshop, but also sometimes come with a toy. Right now Cady Gray is wearing the laminated fairy wings that came with the Abby Cadabby DVD.

Noticing that her fairy role play apparently included a mandate to be beneficent -- her first fairy act was to put pretend batteries in Archer after he claimed to be broken down and in need of "reprogramming" -- I dubbed her Helpful Fairy and sent her to clean her room. She flitted off cheerful as you please, and repeated the performance when asked to clean the front room. Nothing takes the edge off of chores like a DVD freebie.

I've been working

Tonight we drove the kids through the big Christmas lights display that our town sets up on its soccer fields every year. We watched the reindeer taking off with Santa's sleigh, the elves building toys at the workshop, the wise men coming to see the Baby Jesus, the twelve days of Christmas (complete with French hens sporting berets and calling birds holding telephones), and a squadron of toy soldiers popping corks out of their muskets.

Then we went into the fieldhouse where the local model railroad club had set up a big layout. The operator showed us all the little pieces of machinery -- log loader, sawmill (logs go in one side, planks come out the other), forklift to unload lumber, and my favorite: the nuclear reactor that used a magnet to pick up "fuel" (ball bearings), spun them through a sphere of flashing lights, and then dumped out "spent fuel" (glow-in-the-dark plastic pellets) into the train car.

Archer and Cady Gray got to go behind the scenes and push the buttons that made the animated pieces go, and Noel held the remote control and blew the train whistle. The kids loved it, but Noel probably loved it even more. His dad was a frustrated model train enthusiast, without a working setup. And I can appreciate the appeal. There are few things I love more than cunningly-fashioned machines, and if they're miniaturized, all the better.

Model railroad hobbyists get a bit of a bad rap for retreating to their basements, depriving their families of affection, and obsessing over toys. I always think of Reverend Lovejoy in the Simpsons episode "In Marge We Trust," playing the conductor as his model train circled the track: ""Attention, HO-scale passengers. The dining car is closed. Root beer is still available, but the cost is now six-fifty. If the passengers will look to their right, you will see a sad man. That is all."

But surely many of us want to build little worlds around ourselves, arranging their parts so they work smoothly, imagining the simplified interactions of their idealized inhabitants. Whether it's a well-ordered office, a fully-stocked TV nook, or a backyard workshop complete with tools hanging on the wall, we like to surround ourselves with an environment we control. One nice aspect of having kids is that we get to indulge in the purest form of this impulse -- driving little cars around towns made of blocks and snapping together train track. And maybe the truth is that we never outgrow it.