Acceptable Toys

For years, I'd dreamed of having a study with floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with my book collection, but also prominently displaying my toy collection as well. My dad had a similar study when I was growing up, only there were, of course, no toys on the shelves. Instead it had respectable things like photo frames and a pair of bronzed baby shoes that all his children once wore, that kind of thing.

Since I always come last in our family, I went a very long time without having anything resembling this study. I had some false starts, where I managed to get one single bookshelf with a few toys and some books on it. But it never lasted long before the room was needed as a bedroom for one of the kids or the bookshelf was needed for storage of excess cans of tomato paste in the basement or something like that.

Eventually, however, there came a day back in 2013 when we moved into a house big enough that the kids all had rooms, and there was still a room leftover that I could turn into my long imagined study. I was surprised that my wife allowed it, because she has never been fond of the concept. But I guess she does in fact love me. How bout that?

I called it Dunesteef HQ (because I imagined that we would actually record all our podcasts there. This was instead the era that we began recording everything while sitting in a parked car in the Kohl's parking lot, so that never happened and made it a complete misnomer), and set up my floor to ceiling bookshelves. Yeehaw!

I've managed to keep that study ever since. When we moved to a new house in Texas, my study got even bigger, and I was able to add more toys to it.

My wife allows it, but she admits also that she hates it. It goes against everything that she considers to be proper design. She has a hard time keeping her paws off of it too. One time when I was at work, and she had the day off she went in to "clean up" my study, and in the process rearranged the furniture, added a rug, and put a bunch of barn wood picture frames on the wall.

I get on her case every time she tries to pull that kind of stuff, and now she has decided that her best strategy for dealing with the monstrosity of design that is my study is to just stay out of there, to never go in and have to look at it.

Which makes it all the more ironic when my wife started to get into the new trend of fairy gardens.

So, ironic that even Alannis could understand it...or maybe not ironic at all...I don't know...

What is a fairy garden you ask? Well, it's as the blog post title says. It's acceptable toys. Toys that are okay for females to be into. In craft stores like Hobby Lobby and Michael's and at nurseries where you buy your plants as well, there are tiny cute little figurines of fairies and dwarfs and houses and benches and fences and stuff to go with them. If you search on Pinterest (or Google for those of us who refuse to ever bother to open a Pinterest account) you'll find countless examples of fairy gardens. Here's a couple:

I'd like to revel in the rubbing in the fact that my wife loves little toys for girls, and uses the same awful sense of design as her design challenged husband and everything, but in the end, I think these things are awesome. I've always thought things like this were cool. For example, when I was a teenager (A TEENAGER!) I went to Disneyland with my family, and I was probably the only person in the entire park that thought the ride...if you can call it a ride...called the Storybook Canal boats was awesome.

Why did I think it was awesome? Because you floated around through all these miniature representations of places from books and Disney movies.

Everyone else was so bored that they were asleep by the time we reached the end of the ride. There was even one person who took his own life because that was preferable to enduring more endless boredom of looking at miniature representations of places from books.

Then there was me thinking, "Wow, this is awesome. I'd love to make something like that. I wonder if they sculpted it out of clay or what?"

Oh, sorry, I believe everyone reading this blog just fell asleep because they were so bored. Let me get to the point, I guess. It turns out that if my wife had ever been able to get from the farthest reaches of Canada down to Disneyland she might have liked the ride too.

Earlier this past fall, she made her first attempt at a fairy garden. She made a waterfall and a pond in a little portion of our backyard, and included a fairy house right nearby.

It turned out cute, I thought, but it had some problems, not with the fairy garden itself, but with the waterfall and pond. They just weren't in there right. The water was leaking out of the waterfall and emptying the pond. It was a disaster for those poor fairies living in its vicinity. Eventually, FEMA came in and moved the fairies out to a fairy trailer on the front porch, and we tore the whole pond and waterfall out and started re-working it.

But my wife wasn't daunted. Yes the waterfall and pond thing wasn't working out, but she had other fairy garden ideas. While trying to fix up the original, she also put together this fairy garden:

This garden had its problems too. Every time it rained, the thing would take a pounding because my wife had located it in a corner of the house where a waterfall would fall from the roof with each storm. It had to be relocated (and then refurbished, because the rain waterfalls had thrashed it good), but now it's good.

In an attempt to be like my wife...or probably more like I just felt left out because I wanted to participate too...I insisted on adding a plant of my own to the display. I got these two little bamboo plants from Ikea the other day, and planted them in the backyard of the fairy house.

My wife doesn't like them. She says they're too big, and make the fairy garden look...off. Eventually, she'll probably remove them, I bet, and I won't even be able to blame her. After all, I won't let her add things to my study, and eventually I'm going to remove all of her additions too. You gotta protect your space, you know.