For millions of America’s parents, there will be a tiny window of peace late on Halloween night.
That’s when the little monsters, stuffed with sugar and suffering radical adrenaline deficit, finally collapse and leave us the heck alone for a few hours so we can finally collapse too.
But when parents wake on Wednesday–assuming we haven’t been drained of blood–we will be besieged again.
November opens the most pitiful of seasons: the toy-buying season.
Billions of dollars will be spent on lurid action figures and dolls and radio-controlled trucks and other junk.
And billions of dollars worth of plastic, like those twin spawn of the devil, tiny little LEGOs and little hard-plastic dinosaurs, which tend to impale sensitive and impressionable feet.
Every year, the concerned scientists at the Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, study toys and then let parents know which ones are really dangerous and which ones are only partly dangerous.
“We look at toys that pose a danger to young children,” said Liz Hitchcock, a PIRG spokeswoman. “And there are so many products on the market right now. Children are such a vulnerable group.”
Most of what the PIRG people recommend is common sense.
I’m sure we all agree that little children should not play with small objects, because they can choke. Some parents aren’t smart enough to keep such sharp, tiny objects away from toddlers. And some toddlers, unfortunately, get hurt despite the best intentions.
That’s because toddlers are determined to put anything they can grab into their mouths.
One of mine liked to shovel fistfuls of dirt from a potted plant and eat it, chuckling happily as he hid under the kitchen table until we stopped him. But he grew out of it.
And older kids should never play with bows and arrows, or samurai swords or those “Star Wars” light sabers, which, with one flick of the wrist, shoot out a 4-foot length of hard plastic “sword,” prompting one brother to brain his other brother and they both start shrieking piteously in the basement.
(We’re keeping a list of such gifts given to our kids, and the adults who gave them, so that we may reciprocate when their own children are ready to have oodles of action-packed fun.)
So as a father of twin 5-year-old boys, I’m obviously worried about their safety.
But what about my safety? What about my poor sensitive and impressionable feet?
What about the feet of adults everywhere who are threatened by children’s toys?
We’re the vulnerable ones.
And there’s no concerned group of do-gooders in lab coats writing reports, trying to help us, is there?
Kids can run barefoot in the darkness across a basement floor strewn with tiny little LEGOs and plastic dinosaurs with hard plastic horns and other junk and never once step on the prickly things.
But let’s say a father comes home tired from work, the kids are asleep, he takes a shower, and later, in his bathrobe, he ambles over to the refrigerator for a beer.
His bare foot will surely find a LEGO. Then he will emit high-pitched screams, and hop around on one foot, and smash into the wall and knock over the lamp, and as he falls, spilling beer on himself and the carpet, he will curse himself for the fool that he is for allowing tiny LEGOs in his house in the first place.
So where’s our protection?
“You mean hazards to parents?” scoffed Hitchcock. “You mean like the time I left my roller skate on the stairs and my mother tripped on it? It’s not something in the scope of our report. Just the scope of my own personal guilt. No, it’s not in the report.”
Another dangerous toy for adults is the toy dinosaur, particularly the hard plastic kind, and most particularly, the triceratops.
That’s the dinosaur with the three horns and the bony skull plate. And it’s that skull plate that will get you, not the horns, and usually on the stairs leading to the basement during the last quarter of “Monday Night Football” when you have a sandwich on a tray.
This brings me to a favorite experiment. Five-year-olds are perfect for this one, and I’m willing to rent my kids out to scientists if the price is right. Try it yourself:
If they’re afraid of the dark, you hold them at one end of the basement, and let them run toward the light.
As they scamper, you may notice that they never crunch a toy with their soft, little feet. Kids must emit tiny high-pitched sound waves, like bats, which bounce off the LEGOs and give their position in the dark.
Other adult toy hazards involve mental pain. Like that inflicted by the cute talking toys with computer chips. These talking toys sometimes get lost under a couch and begin maniacal chattering at 2 a.m.
This is the time when wife and husband truly bond, as they hiss at each other and throw cushions across the living room, each blaming the other’s family for the stupid talking toy they can’t find.
We suffered with one that was supposed to say, “Oh, I love you.” But actually, it sounded more like, “I know you’re alone!”
It was like having one of those evil Chucky dolls. And we finally found it, hours later, in a cabinet.
“Children are such a vulnerable group,” said Hitchcock.
And so are we.
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Don’t miss John Kass’ unique take on the news Mondays on the “WGN Morning News.”
