Battling the Death Star

One of Abbie’s favorite toys is the star-shaped shaped contraption you see her using in the photo above these words. The toy’s premise is you reach into the large center hole, pull out one of the brightly colored blocks, then push the block through the appropriately shaped hole back into the toy. Your reward is lights and music every time you reach into the center, and every time you correctly push a block back into the toy. While simple in concept, it’s actually more stimulating and gratifying than some jobs I’ve held.

Abbie doesn’t always use it in exactly the intended way, though. For starters, she is way too young to cognitively grasp the concept of matching a block with its correct hole, thus daddy starts the block through the hole so she just has to finish pushing it to get her lights and chimes goodness. Sometimes that short-cut isn’t good enough, so Abbie finds the little yellow button inside the hole that triggers the lights and chimes and pushes it repeatedly to get her reward without the bother of pushing a block. Then sometimes Abbie just wants to chew on a block, but not just any block; she wants the block that she just pushed back into the toy. Instead of reaching into the large center hole with ample room for both hand and block, though, she attempts to retrieve the block through the same hole it disappeared into. (See above picture for illustration) The result is Abbie screaming frantically while she struggles to free her hand from this toy turned baby-trap (the “Death Star” if you will), and daddy fighting back laughter while he waits for Abbie to let go of the block so he can pull her hand back to safety. Showing no signs of the certain emotional damage she just suffered, she’ll often reach back into the same hole to reclaim her block, restarting the whole ordeal. Brave girl.

Speaking of Star Wars references, I picked up the novelization of the third (sixth?) movie the other day, and am determined to read it before the movie opens so I can casually blurt out plot spoilers. For example, Anakin’s father is actually Eric Cartman’s mom. I need to enjoy this book because I don’t plan on seeing the movie until it hits DVD. Before Abbie I enjoyed going to theaters often, but I can count on one hand, with digits remaining, my theater visits since her birth.

Speaking of battles, my wife has been spending her limited free time recently redecorating our bedroom. I’m not much of a pillow guy (I sleep on one pillow filled with a smattering of well-pulverized feather molecules), but I walked into our bedroom this afternoon to find seven (7!) pillows adorning our full-size bed. Still, I may tolerate our over-pillowed bed if it’s the price I must pay to get a freshly made bed every day.