Here’s something to protest about …

LEGO's sexist minifigures are not something to cheer about.

(h/t to a tweet from Shira Tarrant)

I was always a really fussy mom about the kinds of toys I bought for my girls. They got baby dolls but I never did the Barbie route with them. I always asked myself this question: If this was a son would I feel comfortable giving this toy to him or would his grandparents complain that it wasn’t appropriate for a boy? That was my acid test question. If most people wouldn’t give it to a boy, I wouldn’t give it to my girls.

I gave my oldest a microscope with a bunch of slides for her first grade birthday. Her room looked typically Montessori. There were small, low books shelves (that used to hold my dad’s law books from Missouri) lined with baskets and different activities. We had a family membership to the Henry Doorly Zoo (the only good thing in Omaha to do) and when I took her for strolls, that’s where we would go. We’d pick a loop to walk that day and which animals we wanted to see. Then, I’d buy her a book on the animal she liked best and her dad would read it to her that night. If we saw it again she’d get an action figure. She could build her own little zoo and frequently did. She said she wanted to be a Vet up until fifth grade when she switched to wanting to be a doctor for people instead. Because of my cancer experience, she wanted to cure cancer.

I took her to Yellowstone the year she developed a thing for bears, deers and elk. When she went through a dinosaur phase, we visited a dinosaur exhibit in St. Paul and we drove to Dinosaur National Monument which was one of my favorite trips as a kid. Unfortunately, she had plenty hands on experiences with hospitals because I had a very difficult second pregnancy followed by inoperable cancer. It went for two years so she really got to see the ins and outs of hospitals.

A lot of the toys I bought were actually wooden ones from Sweden that I had to mail order. They included puzzles with knobs, lots of wooden blocks. I had her godfather Jim make her a huge set of blocks so she could build herself into a castle if she wanted. She went through an intense My Little Pony stage so I bought her a kiddie medical kit and let her play vet on them.

She’s a doctor now delivering babies and pushing 30.

The younger one is a finance major at LSU. She’s my soccer dakini. Both play piano. Both draw and paint really well because we did endless art and craft projects at my house. It was easier to do that with their friends then clean up the mess and chaos later of unsupervised non-Montessori trained neighborhood kids.We also cooked and baked a of personalized pizzas, cupcakes, snacks, and cookies.

Neither complain that they lived a childhood without guns or sexist toys. (Although I do get yelled at about not giving them ballet lessons which both later did on their own.) We’d get the usual stockpile of them when they had birthday parties,but I always ensured I gave them something more exciting than a Barbie. For the youngest, it was usually something she could bang on like a drum or a bunch of rhythm instruments. (For mom, it was a bottle of Tylenol, a box of Calgon, and some earplugs.) The other thing she loved were trains so I bought plenty of them over the years in appropriate sizes shapes and types. We visited the aviation museum at Offutt AFB and the train station museum a lot. She liked things that moved as much as she did. (She used to scare the boys at her Montessori because she was very physical and assertive. She never hit any one but she knew how to stand her ground.)

Again, building blocks were a staple in my home because they were the one toy that I used to love. You could do anything with them. My cousins were of the Lincoln Logs generation so I did get some hand me downs of those things too. But what I really liked were the early versions of LEGOS so they pretty much hit the top of my list when I had the girls.

One of the toys that I always gave the girls were LEGOs. Well, evidently a lot has changed about LEGOS these days. They’ve just introduced fourteen new minifigures that are all yellow. Two are female. One is a nurse and the other is a cheerleader. Go check out the adventuresome kinds of things that the males do … including circus clown, spaceman, and zombie.

Sigh, some things never change. Some things change for the worse.

I intend to contact LEGO here and pitch a fit. Where is NOW when you really need them?

update: I’m not sure you read the ad accompanying said cheerleader, but here it is:

The Cheerleader is perpetually filled to bursting with energy, excitement and enthusiasm. She prefers cartwheels and handsprings to plain old ordinary walking, and she waves her pom-poms around wildly whenever she talks, which is pretty much all of the time.

compare that to the spaceman …

Greetings, strange creatures. I come in peace!”

This brave and intrepid space traveler doesn’t quite realize that he’s not out exploring the cosmos. The Spaceman walks in long, slow bounds across the landscape, somehow ignoring the fact that gravity is perfectly normal for everything else around him. He’s friendly and fearless, always happy to investigate a strange new place or salute a stranger with a universal-greeting hand gesture, but his unshakeable belief that he’s dealing with alien creatures and worlds can lead to a lot of confusion for everyone involved.