Keeping it Quiet
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Friday, January 09, 2009 9:56 PM
Parenting with another person is an exercise in compromise, and working to make your ideals and methods line up with your spouse’s can sometimes be a challenge. I’ve certainly experienced this.
However, there is at least one topic on which Bryan and I have always been of united accord: we want as few noisy toys as possible in our house.
Some people do not mind noisy toys. My sister, for instance, has a very high tolerance for the assorted battery-powered and percussion-style toys that her two-year-old son loves because they assist him in making as much of a racket as possible.
Bryan and I, on the other hand, made a pact with each other that we would not buy our children anything that takes batteries and makes noise. We don’t try to dictate gifts, of course - it’s generous of our relatives and friends to buy our child anything at all - but for our part we do the most we can to keep the automated noise at a minimum in our household.
Since we are crafty parents, the noise-making toys often… lose their ability to make noise after a while. (Fortunately, Camilla still seems to like playing with them once they’ve been silenced.) This means that only after gift-giving occasions do we generally have noise-making toys around the house that are actually functional. This is a few-week grace period during which Bryan and I are trying to be tolerant and let our daughter enjoy the new toys, before we’ve reached the threshold at which we just can’t stand it anymore and must disable them.
And every once in a while there is a noise-making toy that actually makes it past the disablement threshold on its own merits. Last Christmas it was a musical cube that plays Mozart tunes in a surprisingly non-annoying fashion.
This year it might be Camilla’s new favorite puzzle, which calls out each letter of the alphabet as you place it and sings the ABC song when all the letters are placed. Its tones are not as dulcet as the Mozart cube’s, but in the two weeks since she’s been playing with it Camilla has already learned to sing the entire alphabet song and identify many of the letters by sight, so its benefits might outweigh its annoyances.
Plus, she loves it so much. The glee with which she dances to that song makes me smile every time.
Eh. We parents might be strong in our resolve to keep household noise to a minimum, but we’re still softies at heart.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
