Liar

I normally don't have so much faith in cardboard boxes, but this one had contents that were promising. I had bought a marble contraption last fall--one of those construction type things where you drop the marbles down shoots and the marbles do all sorts of tricks and flips.

True to myself, I forgot about wrapping it at Christmas and actually forgot about it until last month when Hubby asked what was in the large bag way up on the shelf. Oops.

So I got it out today. It promised hours of fun. It seemed like a good chaser after the 30 minutes Bubba and Moosie spent flushing the toilet and analyzing how the flapper, floater, etc. worked. I don't find mechanical things so interesting, but apparently according to their squealing and dancing, I'm missing out.

So anyhow, back to the marble thingy. I thought it would be just the thing they would enjoy, but it was more like 20 minutes of me trying to build the marble thing interspersed with a few minutes here and there trying to keep Bubba and Moosie's excited hands from destroying my pitiful progress. Then it was about 10 minutes of Bubba and Moosie fighting over which marbles they claimed as their own, then Bubba throwing and Moosie rattling said marbles. Eventually we played for about 10 minutes dropping marbles and watching them do half-hearted twists and swirls until they jammed at the bottom. And then Bubba and Moosie decided it would be more fun to unjam the marbles and then unjam the entire contraption until it was a primary-colored plastic heap on the floor.

If you count the anticipated 10 minutes I'll have to listen to Hubby regarding his disdain for the marble contraption and marbles along with the pointlessness of me buying such a useless pile of clutter, then we almost got 1 hour of fun out of the durn thing. Guess this is the last time I believe a card board box. I bet if I called the company, they would say that the "hours of fun" was not meant to indicate consecutive hours of fun, but collective hours of fun accumulated over a lifetime of ownership. I should ask them if they have data to prove the validity of their assumption.

Yes, I should spend more time playing with marbles and less time with the special education crap I've been pondering lately. That has suddenly become very clear.