Cars

These blog posts are like London buses. You wait ages for one, then it starts raining, and when you're thoroughly wet three come along at once.


At a recent consignment sale we found a Disney Pixar Cars Ride-on for $20 - a great saving on the $70 it costs new, so we snapped it up.

Ed couldn't decide if his sunglasses looked cool with his new (Jocelyn) jacket.

or if it was easier to drive with them off.

Decisions, decisions.

He eventually seemed happy to go without the sunglasses. And we're off...

Sometimes Mum is the backseat driver

and sometimes Dad takes a turn

but we all know who's really in the driving seat.

As we have an expanse of concrete driveway beside the house, and a quiet cul-de-sac area around us, this ride-on adds a whole new dimension to Ed outings, and by next Summer he'll probably be having supervised  play time outside riding it for himself.

The ride on has four stages. The first is a rocking horse style, but we took the rocker base off for this outing and as it's working well as a stroller alternative it'll probably stay this way. At present it has footrests to stop little feet catching on the pavement, but they can be taken off to allow self-propulsion. There's also a safety bar on at present which comes off when the child is stable enough, and the long handle can be replaced with a shorter one. There's a tip-stop at the back, as the car is lighter than the rider, to prevent backwards tipping and head bumps. The steering wheel has built in noise makers, but as there's no off or volume control we took the batteries out to avoid an incessant stream of Disney-drivel. 

As an aside, we're trying to avoid merchandising toys as far as possible, but as Edward has never seen the movie CARS he doesn't know, and it's impossible to avoid Disneyfication completely, so we're just trying to keep it under control. Easier for a boy than a girl perhaps, as judging from the toyshop shelves all any girl wants is to be a Disney Princess.