April 9. Day 99. Careful he might hear you

 In a conventional toy store, there is a fairly conventional layout and sorting of toys. Toys are sorted by the age of the child or the type of the toy - so board games are together, separate from construction toys or dolls or soft toys. This is all well and good but there should be a further refinement according to who is buying. There are toys parents buy and toys clueless relatives buy. I recall the look I received in my BC (before child) era when I bought my nephew a battery operated chain saw. It was not only incredibly noisy but it chewed through batteries. This makes it very unfriendly to parents. Parents will buy a toy not just because the child will like it but how the rest of the household will cope. I remembered this today when my three-year-old buddy Elliott was conducting some large scale "pruning" in the garden with a toy not unlike the one I bought twenty plus years ago. Eventually he got bored and went chasing butterflies and then my dogs and playing with his dinosaur. Bliss. I would be lying if I described any of these activities as "quiet play". They were not. All of them were accompanied by high pitch squealing. But give me a choice between happy squeals and battery chainsaws and I'll take the human grade noise every time.