There are only two Spuddies left on the porch—the one that looks like a six-legged hedgehog and the one with four twigs sticking out of its head.
Spuddies are my kids’ project that answers the question, “What do you do with a ten pound sack of potatoes, an unlimited amount of sticks, and a few hours to kill on a camping trip?” In this case, they made ten little men (and one hedgehog) using Idahos, sticks, and, for one scary Spuddy, bits of glass for teeth. They brought all eleven of them home to show me, and so I did what any proud mother would do. I posed them on the porch for a picture.
I like the Spuddies. I like them because they’re something that my offspring made with their own hands, and I’m a hopeless fan of every hand knit potholder, ceramic dish, and woven basket that my children bring me. I believe this response is due to a chemical reaction that happens to women after they have their first child, and so it’s nothing for which I have to apologize or for which I need therapy. I accept that I will always gush over my kids’ handcrafted items the same way I accept that I will always only wear clothes with elastic waistbands.
I also like the Spuddies because they’re proof of my kids’ creativity. Their brains haven’t completely turned to cooked cereal after too much time in front of the computer. There they were, out in the woods with nothing to do, and they scrounged raw materials and built something. If they can make Spuddies, it means that their synapses are still firing, their imaginations are still in working order, and video games have not turned them into mindless drooling zombies. It’s nice to know that if my kids were stranded on an island somewhere with no digital comforts, they’d still manage to find ways to keep themselves amused. It also means that they’d starve to death for the sake of playing with their food, but that’s another worry.
Spuddies are also concrete evidence that my children aren’t grown up yet. When you’re an adult and you see a sack of potatoes, you think about food or work, depending on whether you’re the eater of the food or the preparer of the food. Only a child with nothing on his mind except how to have as much fun as possible in the next couple hours, could look at a sack of spuds and see potential action figures. If my kids were as mature as they’re always telling me they are, they would have been too embarrassed to make toys out of vegetables, much less bring the collection home to show their mother.
There are one or two drawbacks to your kids making their own toys. For one thing, the toys don’t come with manufacturer’s warnings attached, like, “This Spuddy has glass shards for teeth. It is not safe at any age. Do not leave it on the floor where your mother will step on it. Throw it away immediately.” The boys felt bad about my foot and promised not to experiment anymore with sharp edged models. Still, it was great lesson in applying direct pressure to stop the bleeding and I’m sure I can use their residual guilt for extra chores next week. If they show signs of slacking I can just start limping again.
I think Spuddies would make a terrific family camping game, except that, of course, there already is Mr. Spud Head or a similarly named product on the market. We bought one years ago. It’s plastic and the parts are mostly gone. Myself, I prefer this organic version to the one that comes in a box. With Spuddies, the number of toys you can make is only limited by the number of potatoes in the sack and what you’ve got available to stick into them. And the best part is, when the kids get bored with them, you can pull out all their arms and legs and facial features and cook and eat them. The Spuddies, I mean.
I don’t think we’ll be dining on this batch of Spuddies, however. I suspect that the nine that are missing are somewhere behind the hedges that surround my porch. Probably I could find them if I looked hard enough, but it’s better to save those under-the-yews-and-in-among-the-creepy-crawlies searches for the spring, when all the eight-legged critters are still sluggish from the cold. Besides, if Spuddies are buried deep enough in the mulch, by this time next year I may be harvesting at least one bag of potatoes. If I’m lucky, my boys will still be young enough at heart to make Spuddies out of them.
Marie Marfia is a sometime-blogger, all-the-time-worrier, work-at-home-graphic-designer living in Jacksonville--Florida's first coast. She writes about her family because they're the ones she cares about most. Her website is http://www.dancingmac.com.