Memories of Childhood Toys - A different world (Favourite Childhood Toys)

Member Name: KLockwood75

Product:	Favourite Childhood Toys
Date:	17/03/09 (83 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hours of fun, simple classic toys

Disadvantages: None

Reading some of the other reviews on this subject has made me feel a bit nostalgic, so I wanted to share my memories too. We didn't have the sheer volume of toys that today's children seem to have - definitely not the mountain of plastic toys that are scattered all over my house anyway - but we had enough to keep us happy. These were my favourites.

Brio
My sister and I used to spend hours building ever more complicated train sets with our Brio. We had stations, bridges, tunnels and a lot of track and I remember taking up the whole of the lounge floor with our creations. Looking back, I think this was a classic toy - my Mum has kept it all and I'm looking forward to playing with it with my little boy in the near future.

Playmobil
We used to love Playmobil in our house. My sister and I had a big collection and we'd play with them for hours. We mostly had the smaller sets as the big ones were prohibitively expensive, but the sheer quantity we had made for lots of imaginative games. My sister used to line them up and make them wait for things - trains, shops, the bus... she was very keen on the concept of queuing. What we really wanted though was the pirate ship, but it was always too expensive and my sister now says she'll buy it for my son as soon as he's old enough as she doesn't want him to miss out like we did.

Sindy Dolls
Apparently, Barbie wasn't socially acceptable in my house, so we had a range of Sindy dolls instead. These were very similar to Barbie, just slightly more realistically shaped. We didn't have a huge amount of shop-bought accessories for them, but my Nan was always knitting clothes for the dolls so they had a substantial wardrobe. We used to spend ages playing with them, dressing them up, acting out stories where the short-haired Sindy dolls had to be the 'boys' (as we didn't have any boy dolls). One thing I really remember was when we wanted to swap outfits but couldn't be bothered to fiddle around undressing the dolls, we'd just pull their heads off and put them on the body wearing the outfit we wanted.

Bricks
I think my parents liked classic, durable toys that weren't about to go out of fashion - along with the Brio, we also had a big set of wooden bricks that we'd use to build castles, houses and zoos. We had a lot of zoo animals too - having built up a collection by buying one each every time we went to the zoo - and one of our favourite games was creating zoos with the bricks, the animals, a monorail made out of Brio and all the Playmobil people queuing up to buy their tickets and see the animals.

Tiny Tears
I used to love my Tiny Tears doll. She was called Flora and she would wet herself when you fed her water (now I'm a Mum I'm not so sure why changing a doll's nappies appealed to me quite so much!) I used to dress her, push her around in her buggy, put her to sleep in her moses basket (made for me by my Nan) and pretend she was my baby. From what I can remember it was a fairly short lived phase though and the novelty soon wore off.

Board Games
We used to play a lot of board games as a family - traditional ones like Ludo and Snakes and Ladders at first, then Game of Life and Go for Broke were the favourites as we got older. I remember Sunday afternoons after dinner with our grandparents and everyone sitting down to play a game together. My husband and I have kept up the game playing tradition - but these days it is ultra competitive Trivial Pursuit or Cranium with friends, usually fuelled by several glasses of wine.

These were the main things, but there were others too - the wooden brick trolley and the wooden Snoopy toy that I dragged around with me as a toddler. I couldn't get the hang of the Rubix Cube so I used to peel all the stickers off and stick them back on so it looked like I'd cracked it. The Spirograph and Etch a Sketch were fun for a while, but the novelty either wore off or we broke them. I had a couple of my Little Ponies and Care Bears, but by the time that phase was in full flow, I'd got to the stage where I wasn't quite so interested in toys any more... we'd got our first computer and suddenly the lure of Space Invaders, Chuckie Egg and Gauntlet was proving to be more alluring. Looking back, we always had plenty to play with and we had a happy childhood... yes, we didn't always get what we wanted, but maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all. I definitely want to encourage my little boy to play in the same imaginative way that we did... we could spend hours playing our games, completely absorbed in our own make-believe worlds, and maybe that is something that the children of today aren't encouraged to do quite so much.

Summary: A lot of happy memories - sometimes I wish life was still so simple