Chemicals for children

[beetiger]

My sister continues to buy my son more stupid toys that attempt to be hygienic/neat by replacing dirt with chemicals. Ove the last two years she's given him lots of Color Wonder stuff, which replaces colored crayon/marker/paint smudges on your wall with greasy pale yellow chemical smudges. It has the bonus effects of having a second or so delay between what your child draws and what he sees, which makes for oh-so-good visual-motor learning, of not showing what colors the fingerpaints are in advance so they get mixed together and your kid gets furious, of requiring you to continue to buy expensive special paper in order to use the toy, and of having kid art that fades in about six months.

Now she's gotten him a big set of Moon Sand, which claims to be useable indoors by replacing sand+water with sand+some chemical goop that keeps the sand-stuff at roughly the consistency of wet sand. Yech. Still messy, and gods know what's in it. After the whole Aquadots fiasco, I'm not really happy about this.
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I'm feeling incredibly misanthropic today, yet strangely at the same time I'm wanting people to pet me about it.

Comments

[marrionettegirl.livejournal.com]

quote from http://www.ilovemybaby.org/entry/moonsand-kids-will-love-it/

just so you know i just put a note on the blog - but my dog did eat this stuff and almost died. For some reason my six year old put a handful in her bowl and a day later she stopped eating and drinking water - she was getting sick out of both ends all around the house - 2 days after that - after we figured it wasn’t just a sore stomach we took her to the vet and they did emergency surgery on her to remove the moonsand from her stomach and bowels - she was dieing and if we hadn’t brought her in any sooner she would have been dead in two-three more days. So - be careful.