Out of the Mouths of Babes

The Girl just spent her allowance pumping quarters into one of those silly machines at the mall trying to get a complete collection of one-inch plastic Adventure Time figures. She failed. She still doesn’t have the Ice King. She has a lot of little hard to open plastic containers to comfort her in her failure, and extra figures to give to her friends at school (why high school students need small plastic figures from a cartoon I have no idea) but it isn’t enough.

She knew, somehow, that I just didn’t understand how great these little bits of plastic were, so she brought some in to show me. She set up a tiny Jake (the dog) on my computer, and he promptly fell over because he was molded at an angle where physics simply wouldn’t allow him to remain upright. That’s fine, a bit of Plasti-Tac on the base can compensate for that. Also, his eyes weren’t white, they were grayish. The girl licked a finger and tried to clean them. She was careful not to lick the same finger on round two.

“Lead-based paint,” she explained.

Good girl, she understands where her tiny treasures were made. I reminded her that we have white nail polish if she wanted to fix Jake’s eyes, or someone at school might have white-out. Even white paint might be obtained. She acknowledged the plan as sound and stopped licking fingers in an attempt to fix the problem.

I have not, however, agreed that these things are the greatest thing ever and this disturbed her. She went and got more. Soon my computer keyboard was covered with little figurines falling over in an attempt to look … cute, I think. I’m not sure. I’m not into Adventure Time in the first place so that could be where the problem is rooted.

Hubby came in and was appropriately excited to view her finds. He’s usually the one who sits and watches that ridiculous show with her. It’s their thing, I’ll let them have it. They somehow wandered off topic from Adventure Time to school, to Interstellar (the movie and that line where they invented something new every day – it was amazing), to it really seemed you could find almost anything in this country. Case in point: inch-high badly-painted Adventure Time figurines that don’t stand up. The Girl gathered her herd of small toys and smiled.

“Isn’t America great?”

“Yes. Especially the bits made in China,” I replied.                        

“Mom, that’s most of it,” she said with an exasperated huff and walked off.

Out of the mouths of babes. Yikes.