Catalogue Chaos

Banished. Evaporated. Confiscated. Gone with the wind. The catalogues in our home are slowly and methodically disappearing. Maybe it’s the financial situation we are in right now (tight - we’re paying for my husbhusband's Masters program), maybe it’s that I can not stand to be asked to look at another toy and told how much it costs and that I can even get free shipping, or maybe I don’t remember what it’s like to be a kid and how much you WANT things when you are a child.

I think if I hear another child say,"Mom, do you wanna know what I want?" I may dive into a roaring rage, stamp my foot, tear the magazine to pieces and yell, "No, I don’t want to know what you want. Not until you get a job or at least practice your piano without having a melt down."

It’s not that I want to squelch the magic of childhood dreams - what kid hasn’t poured over a catalogue during the months before Christmas, looking, longing, and planing? The JC Penny’s Book got plenty of wear at our house. But that’s just it, we had one catalogue. These kids get several every month, plus tv commercials and newspaper ads. It’s just too much. I can’t see it being healthy to spend so much time thinking about what they don’t have instead of playing and enjoying the things they already have.

Have you seen the commercial where the children ask their mom to read them a bedtime story, so she lays in bed with them reading the Toys "R" Us Big Book? UGH. I have one child who’s bedtime reading consists mostly of the Lego catalogue. When I went in to have our before bed chat the other night I asked if we could talk about something besides what he wants to order. He said he couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.

Most of the catalogues have already hit the trash, many of them before the kids even know they came. A few are being stored a may have a short stint for about a week when the kids are ready to make up their Christmas lists for their grandparents, and then they will disappear again.

Funny, we ask the kids what they want for Christmas and often they have to see something on TV or whatever before they realize they want it. What was it like before all this media, when the only things kids coveted where what their friends had?

I’ve even thrown out my catalogues, and you know what? I don’t really miss them. They were sapping my time away from me as well, making me want things I didn’t even know existed before I checked the mail that day.

So we are taking a break.. Perhaps tonight my children can fall alseep reading a book.