Gear Head

Recently Aiden has become interested in gears. (Absolutely anything mechanical fascinates him!) He had pointed out pricy boxes of Gears! Gears! Gears! in the Children's Museum gift shop and I had the thought to check eBay, figuring I could run anything used through a dishwasher cycle and save a ton of money. I found an auction for a "large box of gears" starting at $5. I was the only bidder and won the box, excited that Aiden would have some gears to play with for a fraction of the price of a single set. The seller said "watch for a really big box to arrive soon!" Yeah, sure, that's fine.

The next day a FedEx truck backed up the drive and unloaded what looked like a small dishwasher. I wondered what on EARTH I had ordered that could possibly be that huge. When the delivery man heaved it off the dolly into our entryway, I recognized the familiar tinkling of plastic toys hitting one another and thought "What have I done?"

Aiden and I spent the next TWO HOURS creating an assembly line to wash & rinse the plastic pieces by the collander full and dry them on my biggest family-size beach towels. An excessive amount of gears are now at Aiden's creative disposal. Here is a picture of the lot after washing them, which barely shows the wild enormity of what was in that box: (photos taken 7/9/10)

These pictures really make the mess look tame, just like the auction picture did. The whole time I was washing nearly 1000-something pieces I was wondering WHO in their right mind buys this many toys for their child. (Besides me, who was hoodwinked by deceiving eBay images showing a box that looked no bigger than two shoe boxes put together.) I'm letting Aiden enjoy them for a while to see what he plays with before donating a chunk to the church nursery & giving some to Sheena for Kyler to play with, too.

The seller was super sweet - and obviously in clean out mode - because a Thomas the Train crane car, a set of magnetic Lincolin Logs and some oddly unrelated plastic building pieces that resemble tinker toys were also found in the box among all the gears with a sweet note from the seller to enjoy everything and she was thrilled to be rid of all of it. Imagine that... :)