Well this terribly off-topic, but I just had to share this. The Mattel toy recall is making big news this week and part of the recall includes some toys that include small magnets. Apparently some kids are sticking the magnets in their mouths and swallowing them. Lesson: Magnets + intestines = bad mix. Who knew!
Anyway, one of the toys being recalled is the “Barbie and Tanner” playset which–and I am NOT making this up–lets your child experience the joys of picking up dog poop! You see, Tanner is Barbie’s yellow labrador retriever and all he does is eat and then go poo. You put little brown food pellets in Tanner’s mouth, push his tail down, and then he poops them right out. Tanner is one well-balanced little doggie and his poop is always solid, which is helpful because the Barbie in this set comes with a pooper-scooper to clean up after him!
How do I know all this? Because this damn pooping dog is my 5 year old daughter’s favorite toy! She keeps this dumb dog in her dollhouse with all her dolls and even lets the dog sleep in the bed with Barbie. But now it’s being recalled because these little poo pellets are a hazard to a kid’s health. Honestly, I’m not really concerned with my daughter putting these little pellets in her mouth. Perhaps that’s because she understands that they represent fake dog poop and it would be gross to put them in her mouth!
But my 3 year old son? Well, he’s not quite as sharp as his sister. (Perhaps it’s because of all the lead paint he’s licking off those other Mattel toys!) Moreover, he’s got a little Beavis and Butthead in him and his first response upon seeing the Tanner dog do his duty was to say something to the effect of “Heh-heh, huh-huh…pooooooop!” So God only knows what that kid might do if he ever got his hands on those dog poo pellets.
Regardless, I’m probably gunna have to get rid of that pooping dog, and that’s going to make my daughter utterly hysterical. It’ll be like the final scene out of “Old Yeller.” She’ll be sobbing and uttering lines like, “No Pa, please don’t put Old Tanner down!” And I’ll have to come up with some BS story about Tanner’s time on Earth coming to an end and how he’s going to doggie heaven. I’ll probably have to bury him in a shoebox in the backyard with a formal gravestone before it’s all over. And what makes it all the more insulting is that, as I am going out back to bury the toy dog, I will have to navigate my way through a minefield of actual dog sh*t from our family’s 10 year old lab who poops–not so solidly as Tanner, I might add–just about anywhere and everywhere he can find a patch of living grass. That stupid Tanner toy hasn’t helped me a damn bit when it comes to getting my daughter interested in picking up real doggie doo-doo, which my daughter describes as “just nasty.”
Damn you Tanner. Damn you to Hell.
(P.S. I wrote about other killer toys last December in this essay).
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