"Maybe we should just put it together now, and have them out under the tree for her when she wakes up tomorrow morning." I suggested to my wife after we put my daughter to bed on Christmas eve, as I looked at the box that contained the Playmobil Wildlife Play Station
Fiona had received the Playmobil Animal Nursery the weekend before as an early christmas present from a family member, and the insanity of IT'S assembly was still fresh in my head.
"No, she won't have as many to open then." My wife answered.
"She loves opening them."
And she does. And more specifically to the story, she did. She loved opening everything Christmas morning.
What little kid doesn't?
The problem is, we ended up spending 10 minutes opening presents, and AT LEAST two hours putting them together.
The box states that the set comes with a bazillion pieces, and that sounds pretty impressive. And it truly IS impressive, but not QUITE as cool as it sounds.
Because when you open it, you find out that the worlds smallest flashlight is two pieces; the worlds smallest jar is two pieces; every VEGETABLE is two pieces; a tree is at least five pieces, the little straps for the binoculars and camera are each their own piece, and the structure itself... yikes.
And yikes again.
It came with a sheet of stickers, so you could label the small pieces if you wanted, to make them look more "real".
Wonder if each sticker counted as a piece?
And while the end result is sturdy and looks great, was it really necessary to make the product so that every little piece of the structure is... a separate piece?
the instructions might as well have read:
"Here's a wall, the wall has space for a window and a door. We could have made it so that the window and the door are framed already, but... no. Those are separate pieces.
So here's the wall with holes, now insert the frames into the holes, now insert the window into the window frame into the window hole, and NOW the door into the door frame into the door hole...."
And the packaging of the bazillion separate pieces left a bit to be desired, too.
"Honey, do you know which of the eight bags of randomly thrown together pieces holds that small dark brown fence post? I can't finish the railing without it! No, not the bigger, lighter brown one, I already found IT - it was in the bag with the zebra, the rifle, one of the tree pieces, two of the carrot tops and the cage padlock...."
All while your child's standing there, with two cheetah cubs in her hand, asking you if she can play with it yet.
"Not yet, darlin'. I have to snap the cot into the side wall into the front wall into the floor...."
Can I put the monkey in the cage? The monkey really needs to go in the cage!
"Well as soon as I put the four pieces of cage together, and then attach it to the underside of the floor of the stilt house, and then connect the house to the top of the floor ...."
And the pieces don't just snap together. Nope. That would be crazy.
Instead, they provide you with bags of little, tiny connectors of various colors, and a little tool designed only to insert the connectors into their respective holes on each piece so that you can in turn connect that piece to another piece.... And of COURSE each color connector's specific to various pieces, because having all connections being the same size is, well.. just plain silly, I guess.
And yikes again.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, as she loves the toys, and has played with them a lot over the last couple of days.
No comments:
Post a Comment