Magical Mesmerizing Magnetism — Seeing (the world) 2̶0̶2̶0̶ 2022!

I’ve wondered for a while what toys the kids will bring with them when the time actually comes to make a decision. Minimalist packing doesn’t allow for the usual parade of stuffies Story carts around. And we’re not going to let Sagan drag along my old dinosaur of a laptop that he uses to play Minecraft. Still, I know they’ll need and want more than books for entertainment.

Enter the discovery of this toy that has (pardon the pun) attracted my whole family: tiny magnetic balls.

Yup. That’s it. Just little round magnets.

Story’s little buddy brought some over one day when she was here playing. She showed them to my kids, and Sagan was immediately smitten. Lucky for him, one of his grandmas was asking at just that moment what he wanted for the holidays. He had his answer.

After they arrived, we all started playing with them. Making patterns, making cubes, squishing them flat, and so on. The kids would go to bed, and Mike and I would absentmindedly play with them while we watched a show. The word that got used the most was “satisfying,” which on a side note is a word that never left my mouth as a kid unless I was talking about a Snickers bar. Now I hear it from kids (not just my own) every day. But I digress.

Some good friends were here visiting (mom, dad, two daughters). I went out one night and came home to find the two dads (possibly not entirely sober) and four kids watching YouTube. There were oohs and aahs like it was a fireworks display. And what were they watching that was so fascinating? Videos of people playing with these magnets! It was hilarious.

So, Sagan has found a great travel toy, assuming a batch of zillions of tiny magnets won’t freak out the TSA scanners. They’re small - I guess kinda heavy for their size but still not heavy overall. They’re quiet. They don’t require charging. And they’re surprisingly entertaining. I approve. I approve so much that (shhh, the kids don’t know) I’ve bought a couple backup sets to add to the collection. I realized I should do this when, on night one, Sagan lost three of the balls from the set of 1,000 and then said, “Ugh, I have 997 balls. I can’t go to bed knowing that!” (Don’t worry, we found two of those and got it to a nice OCD number of 999 so he could rest easy.) They’re a bit like the original Lego blocks* in that having more of them allows for more creativity without having to keep them separated into sets. But stepping on them doesn’t hurt so much.

I highly recommend these if your kids are past toy-eating stage. (Strong magnets can be really harmful if ingested so don’t get these for little ones!) We found ours on Amazon by searching “magnet ball toy.” Hell, just get some for yourself. Drink some wine, turn on YouTube, and make weird shit. It’s fun.

*If Mike reads this post, he will be very proud of me for not writing “legos,” because that is incorrect. They are officially “Lego blocks.” This is a rare grammar-related thing that I don’t care about at all, but he always corrects me.