New Toy

If you ever buy Play Foam, don't expect the colors to stay separated for more than the first 2 minutes. I knew I wasn't being very child-centered at the time, but today when the boys and I sat down to our new set of play foam blocks my obsessive side got the best of me. I just wanted to keep the colors separate - the little blocks are so clean and organized and the pastel colors so true when you first peel off the cellophane wrappers. Even Beck said he didn't want to mix the colors, but Yogi did. At first it was just the blue and white. And I decided that since it was only two colors I would try to separate them out again. I worked painstakingly for 40 minutes (40 minutes!) and I barely made progress. And while I was doing it, Yogi had the green and pink all smashed together. Listen to me. Just mix them up and get it over with.

Oh, and the pictures on the package make it look like you can create anything with the stuff. Not true! Before we even opened the package the boys were asking if we could make front loaders or fighting dinosaurs. The best we came up with were snakes. But they did enjoy sticking gobs of it on their faces as beards and mustaches and they spent a lot of time loading up their trucks and burying their hot wheels in it. They also crammed it down a paper tube and spent a lot of time trying to get it back out.

On the bright side, it's very clean, easy to pick up, and kept the boys occupied for more than an hour.