We love you; why don't you like us enough to give us lids?
I really don't get it. The boxes are nice and wooden and contain all manner of small and large pieces - often they have their own compartments. So why do they not have lids so that an errant toddler can't knock everything across the floor? I have a set of shapes and cards that Sally was given for her second birthday, but it hasn't been played with nearly as much as it could've been as I have to keep putting it on shelves that can't easily be reached so I don't inadvertantly stab myself in the foot with a pointy diamond shaped counter. There is another solution to this problem. A solution that would mean it could live on the shelf with the other jigsaw puzzles. A lid.
Last Christmas Melissa and Doug gave to me a puzzle conundrum, puzzles that do not just line up on their sides in boxes. I solved this by buying zip document wallets. As a ploy this worked exceedingly well. I have never found the chicken that went missing five minutes after Sally unwrapped Pip's Christmas presents for him, but all the other pieces have remained in close association with one other, and now that darling little Pip has moved on from shape sorter puzzles they can go in the attic in their little bags and come back down again in a year without muddling themselves up when I'm not looking.
In the summer Sally was given a box of your beads to make in to bracelets and necklaces and whatever else she might want. They came in a nice wooden box. A box of beads. Without a lid! (What the ...) One of my kitchen boxes had to be sacrificed to the cause.
But this Christmas neither a zip wallet or a sistema box is going to cut it. This year is the year of stamps (several sets of them) and of the pizza and the cake set. Oh the pizza and the cake. I knew they were a poor idea when I bought them, but I did it anyway. Now I have stamps all over the place and wooden pieces of pepperoni trying to escape into the compartment for the chocolate strawberries and I'm not sure how much patience I have to counter it all with.
Please Melissa and Doug, it doesn't even have to be a good lid. It doesn't need to have hinges or anything fancy. A little groove a piece of wood could slide in an out of. Heck, a sturdy piece of cardboard would be an improvement.
And if you really can't manage that, could you at least give me a the reason? What house do you think all your delightful toys are going to? It is one where yards of shelves run around every room or an endless number of drawers pop open to reveal a nice, tidy, orderly box with all the little pieces still in their correct slots and narry a displaced counter in sight? If so, where is this house and why is it not pictured on your website? Or is the answer that you're not in fact a nice happy family company and instead your true aim is to drive parents to distraction - to lure them in with wholesome looking wooden blocks and positive developmental ideas and then watch on with gleeful merriment as a pregnant lady tries to retrieve bits from under the sofa? If so, well played.
We used this one earlier to write thank you cards - I am sure Sally will insist on putting it all back together in the plastic cut out every time she uses it. That sounds like the behaviour of a four and a half year old.