Junior chefs
It's occasionally worth making a special trip to the ritzy Main Line just to hit the thrift shops where the well-heeled dump their "junk." Some of these places' "thrift store prices" seem like delusions of grandeur, but I've occassionally scored some serious bargains.

Over the weekend I found a big Fisher Price play kitchen for a mere $5. It's not in mint condition, but I can live with no microwave door for such a great price. A similar used toy was on eBay for $30. Play kitchens sell for $40 to $120 new.

Seeing Claire enjoy the new toy got me thinking about my childhood play kitchen. Aside from a plastic and a ceramic tea set and some baking pans that were new, all of it was handed-down stuff. Some of the furniture and utensils came from my much-older sister (1950s toys), others were frankly "extreme hand-me-downs" from my mother. I played with Mom's 1930s all-metal stove, and iron that at one point could actually be used to press doll clothes, and a well-constructed dish hutch with an enameled steel countertop.

When I got a Holly Hobby Easy Bake oven for my 8th birthday, I didn't like it nearly as well as Mom's old toy stove. For all its attempt at charm, the plastic 1970's faux potbellied stove just wasn't as cute or imaginatively functional. Mom's stove was made from tin, had curvy legs, two little burners and an oven door that opened and closed. When Mom was little she could plug in the stove and, I suppose, bake tiny cakes in it. Someone had removed the cord at some point in the 40 years before it became mine.

Today's toys are safer. No one today would think of giving a child a working iron as a toy, for example. I really don't think they're very well made, however. Plastic cleans well, but wood, steel and tin can last for generations.

Despite being made from cheaper materials, today's toys are so expensive because they come with so many bells and whistles that seem to discourage imagination rather than encourage it. I read a number of reviews on the amazon-toys R us site in which parents complained about toy kitchens being "bossy" and telling the child how to play. Many said they removed the batteries so their kids would actually enjoy the toy. Imagine paying $120 for something, then disabling the most expensive component. That's not my idea of intelligent design.