Honest Reviews Of Popular Kids’ Toys

You start out your parenthood journey thinking you’ll always buy simple wooden toys and limit the purchases of family and friends so your tot ends up with a limited supply of play things and your house doesn’t look like a shrine to brightly colored plastic, but then life happens. You have birthdays and holidays. Grandmas start finding excuses like, “It’s the Monday before the week before your birthday!” to send you boxes of junk from the toy store. Before you know it, you’re on Hoarders: Too Many Fucking Toys Edition. Somewhere in all of the craziness, you start to become an expert on children’s play things and all of the major suckage therein. Here are some honest reviews most of us could probably write about the most popular kids’ toys:

1. Play-Doh

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Play-Doh, Play-Doh. Satan’s clay. We bought this expecting a fun half-hour of nostalgia sculpting shapes with our kids. Instead they asked us to help them roll a ball 97 times, ripped each color into a million pieces that got scattered all over the floor and mashed into the carpet with their feet, and then mixed all the colors together. It did keep them occupied for hours, though, and the floors aren’t hard to clean if you let the “doh” harden and then pick it up on your hands and knees. Let the kids do it and burn off the calories from all that Play-Doh they ate. 3 stars.

2. Train Table

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Sometimes my kids play with this for hours. Other times they leave it abandoned for months on end. I can’t quite figure out if we got our money’s worth and the thing is rickety as all hell, but I’m always glad we have it when they’re not home and I sneak in their room to play with it myself. Shhh. 4 stars.

3. Bubble Machine

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My kids spent six straight months begging for one of these every time we went to Target. I finally relented on a lovely spring day and bought them one to play with outside. It broke after two uses, but for those two shining moments in time I got to see the wonder on my kids’ beautiful faces as they realized that nothing is ever as cool as it looks in the store. 2 stars.

4. Play Kitchen

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An iconic childhood toy. Your kids will love it, but you’ll almost always wish you went with the cheaper model because kids really don’t care if it lights up, sings songs, has granite counter tops, or comes with a fully functioning ice machine. All they want to do is throw plastic food everywhere and find a way to incorporate Play-Doh and things from the real kitchen into their imaginative play. Hide the ketchup. 5 stars.