LOST: No Squeakies!!!

The Baby can kill a squeaky toy in a matter of minutes. I find it quite amusing. The Baby's favorite toys are these little furry squeaky balls which are part of a toy called "Egg Babies." You stuff the little furry squeaky balls into some sort of "toy." She has an alligator, a platypus and now a new duck that I brought back to her from the States:
Egg Babies are a take-off of the I-Cube "learning toys" for four-legged kids:











These toys are NO challenge for The Baby. None. Whatsoever. She can get those little "plush covered squeaky balls" out of the cubes in seconds. Seconds! And she can get all of the rings off her little "Squeak Puppy Learning Toy" just as fast.

While these toys are supposed to be "interactive" and provide hours and hours of fun for your four-legged kid, when they are so easy they can hardly provide hours and hours of fun. Truly the most joy, insofar as The Baby is concerned, that is derived out of these toys is the joy of squishing each little "plush covered squeak ball" over and over and over again until she finally kills the little plastic mechanism inside of the ball - or ring - or whatever - and then the squeaking stops. Completely.

When The Baby was just that, a little black-fur-ball of a puppy, and she would play with her "squeak" toys listening to the squeak for hours, I would say things like "Oh, what pretty, pretty music you're making" and "Mommy likes your singing." You know. Stuff like that. The kinds of things that all two-legged Mommy's say to their little four-legged cute as Christmas balls of fur.

I've said before that I knew I was not going to like "LOST," and how very, very wrong I was about that. I was hooked after the very first episode of the very first season which DH and I bought on DVD during a trip to the States last year and brought back with us. We have a friend who just happened to have the second and third season, which we borrowed and watched and then had to wait until a recent trip to the States, this past month, to get our hands on season four, which was released on December 9th. We brought season four back with us and devoured it. Watching a whole disc at a time instead of a single episode at a time.

Last night, as we sat on the edge of our respective couches, watching the very last episode of season four, The Baby pranced into the living room with one of her new yellow "eggs," and promptly jumped onto HER ottoman [I get the couch; DH shares the love seat with The Boy - it's fair - it's just how it is] and started "squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeaking." I can ignore the noise. DH cannot. He turned the volume up - and then turned the volume up again. All was fine for about thirty seconds and then he could take NO more. As The Baby continued to "squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak" I am pretty sure she was just waiting for me to praise her - as I usually do when she's making "such pretty music," DH wasn't at all impressed with the concert she was performing. DH said, "Baby, no." "Baby, stop it." "No. That's enough, Baby." Finally he just couldn't take it any longer and he jumped off the love seat and grabbed The Baby's "egg" out of her mouth and stuck it on top of a "hat chest" in a marble chalice. Oh my gosh. You could SEE the heart-break in The Baby's beautiful brown eyes - the sadness - I'm pretty sure I saw tears, and I wanted to jump off the couch and give it back to her. I didn't...

In case you don't know what I am referring to when I call the piece of furniture that DH put the "egg" up on, a "hat chest" is a chest that has "step-like" looking drawers, cupboards and openings. Ours is a fairly big one; it is a six-stepper. It looks something like this:

This is the closest I could come - finding one on the internet - without actually getting the camera and going to take a photo of ours, and downloading it, and uploading it. [I shared yesterday, with some music videos. I'm not that much of a giver... So not taking the time, right now, to post our hat chest.] The "egg" was probably on the fourth step - which, on the one I've pictured doesn't look very high - our chest, although the same idea, is much different and the fourth step is pretty high.

I had a hard time concentrating on LOST - one eye had to be glued to The Baby, who, truly is a pretty smart little girl. I could just see it coming - I knew it was going to happen. The Baby was quite distressed looking at her little "egg" so high up on a shelf - peeking out of a marble chalice - and she was bound and determined that she was going to get it. Every couple of seconds I would have to say, "Don't even think about it Little Girl" or "ut-uh Pretty Princess" to get her attention so that she knew that I knew that she was planning on doing some "climbing." For an hour and ten minutes she paced back and forth from me to the chest. "Please, Mommy. Help me! I must get my egg." I finally got up and grabbed the egg and put it on a shelf in the laundry closet and shut the door so that she would quit fretting over it. Poor little thing. Like I said, her "squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak" is music to me - and I can drown it out. DH cannot. It is irritating and obnoxious to him. [I keep telling both Kids that Mommy loves them more than Daddy does!]

Finally, when the very last episode of LOST season four was finished and both of us had collected ourselves and moved from the couches to the kitchen I knew it would be safe to give The Baby her "egg" back. I didn't give her just one egg, though. Nope. The package that comes with the toy that has two replacement eggs with it happened to be on the same shelf so I headed for the toy box and grabbed the duck and filled it with three squeaky eggs! Two brand new ones and one partially flattened, matted down one. The Baby was thrilled. A millisecond later we both heard her lovely music coming from down the hall. "Squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak..." And a second or two later she trotted down to the kitchen with TWO squeaky balls in her mouth. She's pretty tricky, I tell ya! "Oh what a Good Girl. Mommy likes the pretty music you are making."

I grabbed the netting and tag attached to the replacement pack of squeaky balls and for some reason I read the tag [and scanned it, too!] before I discarded everything. It is worth posting:

Clicking on the image will enlarge it. But if that doesn't work, here is what the "instructions" on the tag say, at the very end, "If the squeaking of the eggs becomes tiresome, simply remove the eggs and return toy to your dog." Ha! Sure. That'll work. So long as you don't mind that your four-legged child is willing to actually climb furniture and break marble chalice's to get to the "egg."

She's such a good little girl, The Baby. And she makes such pretty, pretty music...