Sinatra is in the back yard, batting around a pine cone.

There is $412,000 worth of cat toys (more or less) inside, but he likes the pinecones.

He seems to have developed a probability wave GPS system of placing the pinecones where I will step on them.  How he knows EXACTLY where the tender arch of my foot will be when I step out of bed or the bathroom is, I think, a testament to the superior intelligence of the feline.  I don’t believe any human power could compute such a thing.

Once, a long time ago, I was sure my children had developed a system for knowing where to place jacks and marbles just where my heel would hit as I came down stairs, but I’ve since forgiven them and put those paranoid fantasies away.  Almost.

Had I given it enough thought, I might have predicted that Sinatra would prefer a pine cone to the balls, feathers and “mice” I have inside.

When my children were just toddlers and just before, the most successful toy either of them were ever given were a sauce pan holding three cubes of ice and a wooden spoon.  Both of them could sit in their diapers and nothing else on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and play happily for EVER.  They stirred the ice, they tasted the ice and they banged on the pan with the spoon. 

Much more elaborate toys never engaged them as well.  Expensive mobiles above their cribs on up to bicycles and videogames, at each age, it seems to me now looking back, the more simple the toy, the better they liked it.  Some of that is my fault.  For example, my son was given at Christmas one year an elaborate toy that “shot” items through a tube system that used vacuum and forced air.  I really booted that one as a Dad by not using it as a teachable moment, but by taking all the fun out of it by trying to control perfection.  It was a replay of my own father’s behavior when I was given an electric model train one Christmas, and that makes my shortcoming all the more bitter.

My parenting aside, the more simple the toy, the better my kids seemed to like it.  An example I often hear is about children who get a ton of Christmas presents and end up playing with the boxes.  I certainly saw some of that in my own kids.

Now, I’m seeing it in Sinatra.

And, I’m wondering …

You know, I wonder if the toys we buy our cats, dogs and children aren’t toys we’re really buying for ourselves.  I wonder if all the computerized learning devices we’re giving kids now — as good as they may be — might not be more about parents and their angst and preferences than it is about play and being a child. 

For certain, the toys we buy our pets are all about anthropromorphizing our substitute children and we delight in buying the presents we think we’d like if we were the cat we fantasize we’d be.

My cat is perfectly happy chasing leaves and pouncing on houseflies and bringing pine cones from outside and putting them under my bed until I go to sleep and then carefully placing them right where my damn foot will hit the carpet when I wake up.  How does the little bastard know I’ll get up on the right or left side of the bed?   Uhm…Oh, well.

And I also wonder if we don’t kind of do the same thing as adults to ourselves.  I wonder if we would actually have more fun and play if we got ourselves the boxes instead of the videogame/plasmascreen/ipod/thingamabob. 

When was the last time you jumped rope for the fun of it or got on the swings and ran to the slide?

Are you playing with the right toys?