Mark Shields

Beanie Babies have been given quite a workout at our house too! My son
especially uses them in all kinds of imaginary play. When we took our
round the country trip last year, piggy was in quite a few photos and even
had photos just of him in places like Multnomah Falls and Banff. I
absolutely love your kids' campground idea. Now, there's geography for
you!

My son has also gotten his money's worth from Brio which we have quite a
collection of due to gifts from grandparents. At 9 he's still adding to
it. Ooh, that goes for Playmobil too. My daughter (11) has gotten a lot
of mileage from a wooden treehouse and adorable little natural accessories.
We gave her the tree house at age 2 and the collection of doll house stuff
has grown a lot over the years. She makes all kinds of things for it and
plays with it a lot. She shows no signs of growing out of it either. It
will definitely be a hand me down toy and if by chance we have no
grandchildren I would love to keep it as a decoration. However, I doubt
she'll leave it behind she loves it so much.

Kristin

-----Original Message-----
From: Game-Enthusiast [SMTP:game-enthusiast@...]

We've gotten a lot of mileage out of beanie babies too. Two of the kids
favorites have gone almost everywhere with us for the last three years.
They've been buried in dirt piles, gone swimming at the beach, been stirred
into flour water goop the kids were cooking with, fallen from great
heights,
and washed a million times. They are still going strong. We definitely
got
our money's worth out of those toys when you consider the hours played
with.
The Breyers are more expensive but when you consider the hours they are
played with the hourly rate is still low. I love looking at it that way.

It's funny but the other day as I was printing out the 10th campground map
each for the kids I had a flashing thought that we were wasting paper. But
they played with those twenty sheets of paper for almost two days straight.
They picked campgrounds from all over the country, we printed the
campground
site maps, then they wrote in the names of each of the animals that were
staying at those campsites. They planned the route they would take to stay
at different camp sites all over the country so they could start in ME, go
to the west coast, and camp their way back to ME. Pretty cool when you
think about it.

Angela