I clearly recollect the years when I was a small kid…I was quite the active type, I never stayed in one place for more than several minutes, apart from the times when I slept or ate. I was constantly running around the house or in the garden. When I chose to go someplace, I never walked, I always ran. And if other kids were with me, everything was a competitionI was even more energetic. I had blond hair (which later turned brown, and I disliked it the moment I noticed I wasn’t blond anymore), I was little in stature and my family thought that I resembled that guy from Deff Leppard.

They all cared for me, and I loved everybody, but what I enjoyed the most were my toys. And I played with lots of toys, due to the fact that Dad had to go abroad quite often because he was an important architect, and he oftentimes got me a toy or two when he came back home. I had an impressive collection of little cowboys and Indians which I used to play with in my little tree house. Not to forget the fact that I owned many types of sports balls, from handball balls to kids’ baseball and soccer balls. My buddies regularly came to my home for this reason and played with my toys for hours. I had all kinds of games, toy cranes, toy firetrucks, toy television sets. Of course, they were all surrogates, and one could only play pretend with the phone, cars and television sets. But we didn’t even feel the need for those toys to actually work, because in those times the toys were only designed to look like real things, they were not made to actually function.

So, I am a happy 40 year-old guy now, and I have a 9 year-old kid that inherited his old man’s awesome looks and curly hair. But things have changed a lot. The stuff kids play with these days are extraordinary. I noticed that every toy must be intelligent nowadays. Many of the toys I got for my child have complex circuits inside, or even software that make the action of playing with a toy quite different from what I was used to when I was his age.

For example, the Fisher Price camera for kids is a thing that I would never have believed would be available to kids when I was little. Kids can snap real photos that you can later keep on a laptop’s hard disk. And itremains a toy! It’s created especially for children less than 12 years of age, and it is hard to break. You can bang it on the wall at will and it will survive. Oh, how would I have liked to have access to such things a few decades ago…

My kid loves this thing. He even uses it in the pool, taking pictures of us under the water. Who knows what they will put on the market next? Possibly, when my child will have children of his own, he’ll get them toy space shuttles that really bring you into the atmosphere and back again, just for fun!