Peter picked this Ewok Hut out from a catalog when he was a preschooler. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, June 7, 1987

Some people can’t resist chocolate. For others, it’s clothes. Some folks, oddly enough, will spend $110,000 on a Ferrari with no back seat and hardly any trunk. Imagine that.

For me, it’s toys. As a consumer, toys are my weakness.

I don’t mind wearing the same skirt to work week after week. In a restaurant, I am content with a plate of noodles and a clean tablecloth.

Guests in our house are invited to sit on a sofa shredded by cat claws and worn down by preschool mountain climbers.

I am not embarrassed by my unimaginative wardrobe, our 9-year-old stereo, my 13-year-old compact car with the squeaky clutch pedal, our threadbare furniture.

I am embarrassed by our den.

The den keeps me awake nights. The den is the main repository of my dirty little secret, my inability to say no to toys.

The den is a humble 14-by-15-foot space, pleasant enough, except that it has been asked to do the job of a Toys R Us Warehouse.

If there is a toy that stands a chance of furthering the cognitive, social, emotional or physical development of my 3-year-old or my 6-year-old, I have bought it.

We own – and mind you this is but a partial list of my excesses – 18 Fisher-Price people, the Fisher-Price zoo, farm, fire station, house, ambulance, moon rover, airplane and bus.

We possess a plastic dragon, a sting ray, a shark, a herd of plastic farm animals and 11 plastic dinosaurs.

Forty-three stuffed animals. Twelve puppets. Two kaleidoscopes. Three shape sorters. Two marble rollers. Two firefighter helmets. One police helmet. A Ninja knife and three toy guns.

Seven He-Man good guys, five He-Man bad guys. Four My Little Ponies.

We have an assortment of four-piece jigsaw puzzles, 12-piece jigsaw puzzles. Sixteen, 25-, 35-, and 49-piece jigsaw puzzles.

Christina, who is 3, used to love puzzles. She could do a 16-piece puzzle unassisted. Then I became ambitious for her and began bringing 25-piece puzzles into the house. She took up the yo-yo.

We own seven family board games, perfect for whiling away idle evenings at home. Except that we don’t have idle evenings at our house. And beside, our kids cheat.

Our den also harbors two cash registers – for practicing up on that popular American pastime, shopping.

Also a doctor kit, presented to our daughter. No harm in introducing her to her options early. No nurse kit.

Three wooden block sets. Seven plastic block sets. Good for pre-math skills, I rationalize each time I write out a check for $15.

But a toy does not have to be educational, useful or purposeful to find its way into our house. Fun is enough.

The slide, the basketball, the croquet set, the indoor basketball net, the baby dolls, the play kitchen, the doll cradle, the indoor playhouse, the rocking horse that whinnies (if its batteries are not dead), and, yes, the battery-operated Ford pickup big enough for two small riders.

A working mother friend of mine says, “My husband thinks it’s guilt. I work full-time so I just keep buying toys to make up for not being there. But I don’t know, I see a toy. It looks like fun. I buy it.”

We are down from 43 stuffed animals to a dozen or so. Here, an American Girl doll, top right, and a pink and white Snoopy puppy, bottom right. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Maybe that’s it – we don’t buy those roomfuls of toys for our kids. We buy them for the pleasure of buying them.

For some of us adults, the closest thing to fun in our overextended lives is a grueling 60-minute aerobics class sandwiched between the evening commute and dinner.

We may not have time to play a game of Cootie with our kids, but we do have time for the quick thrill of buying it for our toy cupboards.

Meanwhile, our kids are trying to tell us something.

Christina spent a happy afternoon recently with a pair of scissors, some tape and leftover wrapping paper – while our cats bat the mice from her new $30 mouse house around the living room.

Five-year-old Julia was given a box of pencils and a 50-cent pencil sharpener.

“She spent the whole weekend sharpening the pencils,” said her amused mother. “She never looked at her new Barbie Corvette.”

Sarah’s mother has hit upon the solution for the likes of me, the mom who can’t say no.

She had just come back from Toys R Us and was feeling a little gluttonous.

“Well, if I have bought too much,” she sighed. “I won’t take the extras back to the store. I’ll take them up to the fire station and give them to the needy kids.”

Presto. That’s for me. Toy shopping without guilt.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

When I looked around the house for toys to photograph for this piece, I had no trouble finding several business boxes full of them neatly stacked in closets and storerooms. Blocks, trains, stuffed animals, the Fisher-Price farm, the fire station — all  carefully sorted and wrapped, some still gummy from my children’s fingers,  all crying out to be taken off the shelf and played with.

As I look at these toys now, I see that, to the credit of their manufacturers, many of them were beautifully, ingeniously designed – especially the Fisher Price toys, the American Girl doll, the Ewok Hut (inspired by the “Star Wars” Ewoks), and the Snoopy puppy. No wonder I couldn’t resist buying them.

It seems that, like a well-wrought story, a thoughtfully conceived toy has a way of going straight to a deep place in the human psyche — the place that wants to play.

The Oakland Tribune, November 15, 1987

Peter likes money.

He wants an allowance.

The subject came up at the breakfast table.

Jon and I debated. Fifty cents a week? 75 cents?

Peter: Halloween cowboy c 1987 B.F. Newhall

“Let’s not talk in cents,” said Peter, who is 6 1/2, pushing 7. “Let’s talk in dollars.”

He wanted $2.

Nonplussed, I changed the subject.

Spending his allowance on candy would not be allowed, I said. “No candy, no weapons, no caps for the cap pistol.”

Jon demurred. “It’s Peter’s money.”

“It’s my money,” said Peter.

Not yet it wasn’t.

We were stalemated. The subject was dropped.

Peter likes money because he likes things. Money can buy him things.

He comes by the tendency honestly.

His paternal grandfather likes things. Victorian Furniture. ’57 Chryslers. Coins.

Peter likes Battle Beast vehicles. Walkie talkies. Rainbow, his stuffed puppy. He-Man swords. Cowboy pistols. Space stations. His blankie.

His things help him to think.

If he is feeling cuddly, he wraps the blankie around Rainbow. Lonesome, he calls Mommy on the Walkie Talkie. Powerful – or powerless – he pits a Battle Beast against the enemy and defeats him soundly.

Peter is loyal to his things.

Every stuffed giraffe, battered firefighter’s hat, nursery school glue project and legless Superman holds an eternal and immutable place in Peter’s heart.

But that does not mean there is no space in Peter’s heart or in Peter’s bedroom for something new.

At the toy store, he spotted a Battle Beast vehicle he had never seen.

“Mommy, can I have it?”

“It’s expensive. It’s $12.83.”

“I want it.”

“Well, you could earn it. You could learn your math facts. I’ll give you a dime for each time you practice a set.”

“You will? Rad!”

“$12.83 is a lot of money. It will take a lot of work.”

Peter fondled the shiny package.

“Mommy, I want to work,” he said firmly.

It cost me $12.83 and 4 ½ hours of my own time, but three days later, Peter knew his addition facts, right down to six plus seven and eight plus nine.

“Three plus four. Three plus four,” said Peter, slapping his forehead. “I’ve got to think faster. Oh, yeh. Seven!”

Another dime clinked into Peter’s stash.

“Wait, mommy, let’s count how much dollars I have.”

Again and again, Peter counted his money.

He learned he could make a dollar with 10 dimes or four quarters. He counted his coins by twos, by fives, by 10s.

I was stunned. I did not know that Peter could learn so much so fast. I didn’t know that he was so intensely interested in money.

Most of all, I was surprised that I could pander so unconscionably to my son’s greed.

When Peter was a toddler and still soiling his pants, I tried everything.

I let him go barebottomed. I followed him around with the potty. I praised. I scolded. I tried patience. I tried exasperation. Nothing worked.

Finally, I tried M&M’s – one for Peter, one for Christina – for every successful trip to the potty.

It worked.

It worked, not because Peter is a profane, banal kid who responds only to bribes. It worked because I gave Peter a choice. He could use the potty and get an M&M. Or he could use his underpants and not get an M&M.

For the first time in his life Peter – not Mom – was in charge of his bathroom functions.

Stephanie’s mother uses raisins and Cheerios.

To get Stephanie to practice her reading last year, she put a raisin or a Cheerio on each word in the word list. Stephanie read and ate, read and ate, read and ate.

“They need a reward,” explains my sister-in-law, Alice, a school counselor and my mentor in these things.

“I wouldn’t work if I didn’t get paid for it. Why should they?”

At least one other mother in our neighborhood has come to understand the value of money.

“I’m going to sell my candy to my mother,” Sterling informed Peter on Halloween night. “Then I’m going to buy a toy.”

“That’s right,” said Claudia, as she served up a Halloween supper of low-cal turkey lasagna. “Then I’m going to throw it all away.”

Two nights later, Jon and Peter saw Sterling and his mother at Safeway.

Sterling was still in possession of his candy.

“I want $30 for it,” said Sterling.

“And I won’t pay more than $5,” said Claudia.

 © 1987 The Oakland Tribune

Peter is 28 years old now. He’s paid off his student loans and his car payments, he doesn’t mind taking the red eye, and if there’s a 401k in the picture he’s maxed it out.