Similarly, they have all these saucer-like contraptions that you can drop your kid in, with all sorts of shiny buttons and things for them to drool on. You pay more and more money for more shiny things, with some sort of implicit guilt if you don't get the top of the line gizmo.
One of my first favourite memories of my sort-of goddaughter was getting her such an "activity set" for her first Christmas. She would crawl over it and hit the various things (drum things, squeaky things, rattly things) that made noise when you hit them. The set came with a little plastic drum-stick, which I kept trying to put into her hand; she wasn't interested at first, but eventually crawled onto the activity set still carrying it, which hit it against the drum thing and made a
much better noise than she'd yet made with her fists. She stopped dead, looked thoughtfully for a moment at the stick in her hand, and proceeded to gleefully bash the hell out of the drum. You could almost see her thinking, "Oh, hey! Tool use!" -- it was a very "2001" moment.
Peter
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