One of the special joys of being a parent is the excitement of bringing home a new toy. Unpacking it with great ceremony; installing batteries or whatever; and then watching as your child, wide-eyed, plays with the cardboard box instead.
Chances are the box will carry elaborate descriptions of the toy's educational features: buttons to encourage "motor skill development"; talking parts to stimulate "intuitive role play"; flashing lights to ensure you already need more batteries; and so on.
It will also probably mention the toy's price - £36.99, in a recent personal experience. And yet your baby is ignoring this state-of-the-art entertainment device in favour of climbing in and out of, and probably, by now eating the cardboard box it came in, which has no innate educational or nutritional value at all, or if it had, the manufacturer would have mentioned it.
The parent (and some of the more sophisticated toys) will feel a bit embarrassed when this happens. But they shouldn't, because the child is learning something important here: the meaning of "irony". OK, maybe the child isn't learning this, but the parent sure as hell is. And besides, the baby will probably get bored with the box eventually and resort to playing with the toy, at which point some of the manufacturers' claims may even turn out to be true.
Boxes aside, though, it's a general rule that babies spend less time playing with toys - expensive or otherwise - than they do with the everyday objects that surround them, suggesting they often have a better grip on reality than their parents.
For example, our baby's toy collection includes - I'm almost embarrassed to admit this - vanilla-scented plastic building bricks; but I know for a fact that she has spent less time playing with these than she has spent trying to pull the safety devices out of the living room's electricity sockets.
Another example is that, for some months now, she has enjoyed playing with the telephone; propping it on her shoulder and chatting away happily for hours on end, in a touching imitation of one of her parents-though-I'm-not-saying-which.
She hadn't quite learned the trick of hanging up, however, so that every time we needed to make a phonecall, we were likely to find that the upstairs or downstairs extension was off the hook. This ensured we got plenty of exercise; as did our friends, who had to contact us by actually visiting.
But you can have too much of a good thing, so recently we bought a toy phone, one with talking numbers and flashing lights, and a "musical roller bar to reinforce cause and effect". I have no idea what the last bit means (with real-life phones, cause and effect is reinforced by the bill), but maybe the baby does. And this is the important bit: the toy phone had a string attached to allow the child pull it around after her, developing "gross" (as opposed to fine) motor skills.
Anyway, she played with it for a while until she got bored. Then she went back to playing with the real phone. And now she pulls the real phone around after her! So you see, while the toy's entertainment capacity was limited, the manufacturers' weren't lying about the educational features.
The simplest of things can amuse children: one "toy" my wife remembered from her own childhood was a box of clothes-pegs, and this has proved an endless source of diversion for our baby. One of the things she (the baby, that is) likes to do with the pegs is to leave them lying around in such places that her father, half-awake and barefoot first thing in the morning, will step on one with the really sensitive part of his foot, causing him to hop suddenly sideways and land on another one.
This is an almost daily occurrence and is excellent for developing a parent's gross motor skills. Language skills too!
But above all - and the toy manufacturers are right about this - babies love things with buttons; even though again, real-life objects are more attractive. I'm thinking particularly here of the remote control. Our daughter finds it irresistible, and if me and her are going to fall out over any single issue, this could be it.
You're watching a football match, Robbie Keane has just rounded the goalkeeper and - Zap! - the baby has practised her fine motor skills again, even though the last time you checked you had the remote safely beside you on the sofa. By the time you've congratulated her on her achievement (her mother's congratulations tend to be more sincere in the case of football matches) and gently prised the thing out of her hand, you've even missed the replays.
But it's the element of the forbidden that seems to make it exciting. Sometimes my wife will be watching, say, Coronation Street; and out of sheer badness, I'll remind the child about the remote control, encouraging her to practise more of those skills. Inexplicably, she never takes the bait.
The most exciting button toy of all, of course, is the computer keyboard. I know this because, every now and again I make the mistake of trying to hold the child while working on the computer, and each time I do she turns into Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano, except with extra arms.
There are a million functions on your modern keyboard, and having about as much understanding of my technical environment as a laboratory rat in a test programme, I stick to the narrow range of what I know. The baby has no such inhibitions, however; and when she attacks the keyboard, hitting whole combinations of keys hard and at random, anything is liable to happen.
Things flash up on screen and are gone before I even see them. The first time it happened, I temporarily lost all sound on my CD player. I tried everything to get it back, but it was several days before I realised that the baby - and I swear this is true - had activated the parental control mechanism. Irony or what?
So, finally this week, I'd just like to say this. If it was my daughter who hacked into Microsoft's Hotmail facility the other day, I hope Bill Gates will accept an apology. I promise it won't happen again.
