Did you hear that?

Modern kids toys are amazing.   Even the analog, now-powered tools have all been engineered for the maximum fun and learning factor.  But, it's the battery-powered ones that I'm amazed with.  It seems like everything makes noise and/or lights up.  This is great because it engages our kids and (supposedly) stimulates the learning centers of the brains.  This is bad, because many of the light and sound toys are possessed.

Possessed, you ask?  You better believe it.  Ever since we've had kids, and therefore bought light-up, sound-making toys, they've repeatedly shown that they light up and/or make noise at times that they shouldn't.  This always--and I mean always--happens after all the girls are in bed.  I'll be walking through the kitchen, and as I'm doing something completely unrelated, I'll hear a loud (and disturbing, without any context) sheep's bleat.  "Is there an angry sheep in my house?" I'll ask myself.  Ah, but no, it's just our fridge farm, a toy that is supposed to be touched before it makes noise.  Did anyone touch it to elicit a sound that could potentially attract nocturnal predators?  Of course not!  Nobody was near it.  Possessed!

Need more?  Okay, you asked for it.  My parents got all the girls a Fisher Price Laugh and Learn house, where the girls can sit on either side of a plastic house-shaped facade and open a door between them.  They love crawling through the door and the music it plays with its many buttons.  Oh, and when the door opens it makes a child-like, comical creaking noise.  Let me stop there though--said creaking sound is only child-like and comical when you see your children sitting there playing with it.  When it creaks by itself, when no one is around to open the door, it's less comical and more disturbing.  Increase that by a factor of ten when it happens in the middle of the night when it's dark and I'm up to check on the girls.  That Laugh and Learn house is lucky it's not yet trash and garbage.

Oh look, the door makes a face that looks like an evil clown.  Great!

And don't even get me started on the life-like, battery-powered kitten that we got for Addie when the twins were born.  First, we actually own cats (which makes a life-like toy cat kind of redundant, but Addie loved it when she saw it at the store), so hearing a cat meowing isn't all that unusual.  It's only bad when it's a loud, terrible meow that's coming from a location where there can't possibly be a cat.  Compound that with the fact that it's the sound a living cat makes when it's supremely pissed, so not being able to pin down the cat's location is a bit disconcerting.  And did I mention that before we gave the cat to Addie we left it in our closet, and it would just randomly meow at a high volume with no rhyme or reason?  I didn't want to, because it's the stuff of nightmares.

I guess that I'll continue to put up with the noise making toys so long as they entertain (and enlighten?) my children.  But if anybody brings home a Good Guy doll, I'm out of here.