William has a toy cell phone--actually he has a couple of them--and he has a toy remote control. He may be only 11 months old, but somehow he knows that they're not real. He knows that the toy remote control isn't as good as the one that Daddy uses to change the channels on the television. And somehow he even knows that the real remote control that we gave to him doesn't really work, either. (We took the batteries out.) It doesn't make the volume increase or decrease, and the channels stay the same.
And William has also lost interest in the toy cell phones since he figured out that they bear little resemblance to the cell phones his parents use. Geez, what kind of self-respecting baby is seen with a silly old blue and yellow plastic phone when he could have a shiny silver flip phone?
Last Saturday morning, I took William to the outlet mall. I was trying on some shirts in Ann Taylor, and William was fussing because he wanted to be on the floor, crawling, not cooped up in his stroller in a little cubicle. Desperate for a few minutes of quiet so I could finish trying on an armload of clothes snatched randomly from the racks, I gave him my own cell phone. Instant happiness. Yes, I made sure to retrieve the phone before he sucked on the antenna or made any scary overseas phone calls.
So when we got home, I gave him an old cell phone to play with. He loves it for now, but I bet the shelf life is limited...you know, until he realizes that he can't actually make any calls on it because it doesn't really work anymore.
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