The enduring appeal of Mr Potato Head

We are what you would call a 'game' family.

We will happily sit around all Sunday afternoon playing Connect 4, Kerplunk, Operation and Uno (it's a card game and my 6-year-old thrashes the lot of us at it!).

So this weekend we were battling it out over a game of Frustration and I thought to myself, has anyone actually managed to invent a new game or toy that can beat the good old fashioned stuff we've always loved?

These days our children are exposed to computer games, high tech versions of old classics and interactive devices that would have seemed positively alien when I was a young girl.

And yet, despite all the technology and the amazing advances, my son will pick a game of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe) over his Nintendo DS any day.

If I offer to sit and do his 100-piece SpiderMan jigsaw with him, he will drop everything.

And don't even get me started on his love of Lego.

We have a Wii and we L O V E it. But a game of cricket in the garden wins hands down every single time.

Hangman, using just a scrap of paper and a pencil, has been fantastic in helping his spellings along.

Tonight, while making dinner, my 3-year-old daughter was totally engrossed with Mr Potato Head. The simplest of toys when you think about it and yet she shuns her make up sets, electronic books, talking round the globe thingy to play with that.

Ah now, that gets me all nostalgic over the toys I played with as a child.

Buckaroo, Spirograph and Sindy. And that hideous doll that that had hair that 'grew' so I chopped it all off one day because no one told this child that it didn't actually grow as such.

And Crossfire which was totally lethal because it basically meant you got to fire ballbearings at each other!

So what were your childhood favourites and do you still play any of them now?

And if not, why not!

NOTE: I just wanted to add how fantastic all the comments were on the Shouldn't we ALL be homeschooling post last week.

Really, it's so wonderful to see you guys get all hot under the collar about something like this and to hear from homeschoolers themselves, teachers and all those who have come across this concern themselves was great.
A fabulous cross section of words from everyone involved and I appreciate you taking the time to leave your comments.

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