So with Lil' Nuts being 2 years old, I thought it time for him to get one of my childhood favorites, HotWheels Tracks. I looked all over only to discover that you can't buy the standard issue orange track anymore. Everything is sold in a kit with a mechanical piece that forces the kid to stick to the design on the box. No putting the track on the stairs... no setting up chairs and tables to create ramps... nothing. Just a fixed set-up that requires no imagination. Damn Mattel.

So I poked around on e-bay and found a couple of folks selling the classic track sets and I bought one. 75ft of track with connectors, 3 loops, a couple of turns, clamps, etc... I think I'm more excited than he is about getting the track. (He has about 50 hotwheels that he received from cousin for Christmas)

I was quite upset at hotwheels for doing this. Just like Lego which now sells everything in pre-designed kits. When I was a kid, my favorite toy was my huge box of 200-300 legos. It wasn't a spaceship kit. It wasn't Farmer Brown or Deep-sea Explorer... it was just a big box of friggin' legos. There were instructions to build about 10 different things (good to do with dear ol' dad on Christmas day) but mostly I just built what ever I wanted.

So many toys today remove the ability for the kid to use his imagination.