Little People Day

Today was Little People Day... The day when all of the little people come out of storage on their monthly toy rotation schedule and the entire playroom becomes a town.

This year, we invited Ava over to join us. Ava is one of Sydney's few friends who is actually her age (and not six months to a year or more older or younger). It's interesting to see their dynamic. With Sydney's older friends, she lets them direct most of the play and with her younger friends, she tries to direct the play. With Ava, they each do their own thing and really seem to enjoy the company even though they hardly interact.

To prepare for Little People Day, I donned Jeremy's goofy miner's light and headed to the attic to get the 80's Little People house. No, this is not mine from when I was a child. Mine was the yellow roof house from the 70's and my father gave it away to the church when I stopped playing with it daily. I was so devastated that in college, when I found this similar (but newer) one in a used toy store, I bought it.

I had to get my retro Little People out because Ava's mom, Grace was bringing her retro Playskool people from the 70's. I have not been this excited to play with a friend's toys in many, many years.

This is the McDonald's and I wish I had gotten better pictures of the trays, but on the side you can kind of see the tray return and the guy in the triangle hat is the McDonald's employee.

She also brought a Playskool Holiday Inn.

If you look at the sign, it even says, "Band and Dancing Every Saturday" because of course the Holiday Inn is where you go for live entertainment.

Here's Ava playing with it and from the other side, you can see the pool.

My favorite was the revolving door to the Lobby. Do you see the 70's architecture?

There are two rooms at the Holiday Inn and a kennel at the side. Did hotels used to have kennels? I don't know.

We did Little People Day after both moms and daughters had gone to see Toy Story 3 and it made the whole thing more poignant to the moms. Look at the 70's little people guys. They are so happy to be out of the attic and being played with. They were Grace's special toys when she was a little girl and now her daughter Ava is playing with them. That must make them so happy.

And Sydney's Little People that stay on rotation.... They normally live in the big basket and their various buildings/boats stay in storage. So those pirates, the dinosaurs, the family people, and Noah and his wife are all piled in together. They get played with, some times, but rarely with their intended set. I imagine their conversations....

"Hey Noah, were you just driving a school bus?," says Pirate Pete.

Noah, sighing, "Yes, my ark is in storage. But what about you, Pete, I think I saw you cooking in the kitchen yesterday."

"Well, yeah, but I had to. There were hungry dinosaurs about."

Roar!!!

"Hey there dinosaurs."

"Roar. Does anyone know where Sally is? Her baby is here by me and it won't stop crying."

Muffled, "I'm way down here. I would pass the bottle up to you, but it's molded to my hand."

Anyway, today all of the toys got to play with all of their sets. Although there will still cross set contamination.

My favorite part of Little People Day, though, is the videos I take of Sydney playing with her people. I looked at last year's Little People Day and was amazed at the difference in her vocabulary and imagination from one year to the next.

In this video, the farmer is trying to corral all of the animals. Some of the animals don't want to go in their places and at the end, the farmer leaves because he has an emergency. The video ends there, on the cliff hanger, because it turned out that the "emergency" was a trip to the circus where all the farmer did was ride the clown car over and over again and honestly, it wasn't nearly as interesting to watch.

In this video, the baby dinosaur is getting sold (think of what happens to Woody in Toy Story 2 instead of wondering if Sydney has been exposed to the horrifying reality of illegal adoptions). After all of the children dinosaurs are gone, the parent dinosaurs thankfully change their mind about selling their offspring. I can tell she was thinking about Toy Story because in addition to the selling of the toys, she talks a lot about fire and she's referencing a scene from Toy Story 3 that bothered her a lot. The thing I really noticed, other than Sydney morphing movie plots to suit her purposes and her awesome sound effects, was the use of made up names. I can hardly understand the names she says because they are so completely invented. I love it.

I have decided to try to do a video (or two or more) each summer with her toys. Think of it as the final nod to Toy Story 3, because I loved the montage at the beginning of the videos of Andy with his favorite toys.