Monday, December 18, 2006

So Much for Championing the Little Guy

I had this great idea for a Christmas gift for my kids: unit blocks! Hours and hours of creative, nonblinking, nonhonking, nonbeeping fun! I may or may not have come up with this idea after realizing that a sadly disproportionate number of gifts slated for Santa delivery made way too much noise. It was a rather humbling realization for someone who had, pre-children, disdained such toys.

But that's a topic for another day.

Since this epiphany came about a little late in the gift-buying season, I scrambled to find some place to buy the blocks. Amazon had a good deal, but the blocks wouldn't arrive before Christmas unless I paid shipping expenses that equaled the cost of the blocks. I wasn't THAT desperate. Instead, I found the blocks at this odd thing called an independent toy store. Really! Imagine that!

I felt rather smug as I parked my car a few blocks away from the store and strolled race-walked down the fetchingly decorated streets of the Local Charming Town. Smug until I found the blocks in the store and fainted dead away when I saw that they were $30 more than the Amazon price. I had wanted to buy two sets, making this a $60 price difference. And those well-made solid-wood blocks? They were really heavy. Far too heavy for a fragile flower with flabby muscle tone to carry down several blocks of those fetchingly decorated streets to my car.

I left the store without the blocks. I will be ordering them from Amazon even though the cheap shipping option will bring them to my doorstep after Christmas.

I am such a sellout.