When I was young, I used to want Playboy magazines. Yes, a 4-year-old wanting Playboy magazines. The reason I even knew those existed was that my crazy uncle gave me one for my birthday as a joke. My parents didn't find that funny and took it away. Then, about a few weeks after that, I DEMANDED that I am taken to the corner store so I can buy Playboy magazines. I figured out why it was stupid a few years later.
Bride dolls were just starting to appear and for two years in a row Santa didn't bring me one. He brought me an adorable cuddly baby doll. I would cry, then after that I didn't care anymore. My mom didn't like the bride dolls and didn't want me to have one. Back in those days, dolls were supposed to represent babies...
I don't think it was stupid, but simply out of context to want things that were not really toys. I wanted to have a porcelain tea set when I was 3 or 4 years old as much as I wanted real household appliances and things like that. Some of those real-life items were given to me and what was really stupid is that I broke them or never took real care thinking of it with future in mind. As for the household appliances, fortunately the 60s was a time at which it was possible to have realistic toy-versions of a refrigerator, as tall as I was that could cool beverages, a one-glass-of-shake blender, a low-wattage mini-iron to get the clothes of my dolls impeccable ironed, a mini stove with an electric burner, the only toy my mother supervised me when being used, besides easy-bake over for tasty pays all the time
Oh, we had those kind of toys at kindergarten! The most I can recall clearly is that we had a plastic stove with a sink and cups and all the stuff a girl would need to experience the "true kitchen feel". Funny thing was that we, the boys, would play with it more than the girls. I guess this just goes on to show that toys shouldn't be gendered.
This is going to sound crazy but, when I was a kid, I always wanted a folding measuring stick. For some reason, I didn't realize that it was something that I could buy, and probably not for a whole lot of money. The guy at the lumber yard had given my dad one and, at another time, when we bought lumber to build a shack, he gave my cousin one, probably realizing that my cousin was the only one of us who knew what he was doing. They were promotional items, I suppose, because they had the name of the lumber yard imprinted on them. I guess I thought that you had to be someone special in order to get one of those, and I never got one. I later bought one when I was in my thirties, and probably still have it around somewhere, but I never use it. I wouldn't have used it when I was a kid, but I wanted one.
Haha, well, that's an interesting story. However, it seems more that you wanted someone to recognize your efforts instead of a folding measuring stick. I guess that the measuring stick was like a sign of passage to you.
I was very curious when I was little. I took apart almost every toy that had a screw. I wanted something like a screwdriver (that thing) so I wouldn't have to break it to see what was inside. I saw that it always worked for others on TV. Now I realized how dangerous it would have been if I was given one.
Hey, I also used to take apart all of my toy cars. Sometimes I would replace their tires and what not. I never needed or felt the need for a screwdriver, though.
I cannot think of a single thing I wanted as a child unless it might have been a better relationship between my parents. Wait, there was one thing. I wanted a Marlin, 39A, .22 cal lever action repeating rifle.
Damn, that's pretty tough. Was your parents' relationship that bad? Of course, you can choose not to answer this question, as it's really personal.
My girlfriend and I started writing a little newspaper for each other, with cartoons and silly made up articles, in 4th grade I think. I wanted this printing press. It was very expensive at that time. My grandmother bought it for me for Christmas. Turned out to be too tedious to set the type, and they didn't give you enough vowels to write anything, and it didn't make sense anyway, when you only had one subscriber. What was I thinking?
I remember one year my parents made a big deal out of asking me what I wanted for Christmas. I told them I wanted a reel to reel tape recorder. They bought me a portable radio/cassette recorder. I didn't show my disappointment but I never asked for another thing after that.
Nothing I wanted was stupid to me. There were a number of things I wanted, BUT, the key word here is "wanted", but didn't get. Anyway, my step-parents didn't have much money, so the list of things I wanted, was much bigger than the things I got. While most of the kids in our farming area had a vehicle to drive in their Junior high school year, I was still riding a bicycle around. Somehow, parents knew I wanted a rifle, so they bought me a Daisy Pump B-B Rifle for either my birthday or Christmas...….to long ago to remember. Then, one year for my birthday, I got a transistor radio. I looked like Snoopy dancing around. Talking about happy.
There were only two things that I really wanted when I was a kid, one was probably stupid, and one was not. The two things I wanted more than anything were both animals. I wanted a horse (pony was an acceptable substitute), and I wanted a monkey. On the old comic books, they always had advertisements on the inside of the covers, and one of the ones that was usually there was for a spider monkey. They were only $19, which seemed cheap enough to me, and probably to my mother, too; but she had a much better knowledge than I did of just how much work (and how much trouble) a monkey would have been. Not like the Cheeta from the Tarzan movies that I imagined a monkey would be. Now, I wonder if they ever sold any of those little monkeys to people, and if they did, how they were shipped, and whether they actually arrived alive and healthy ? After meeting some people who actually had a monkey for a pet, I was able to see that it was not what my little-girl mind had imagined at all, and I am reasonably glad that my mom wouldn’t let me have one after all.