Tuesday, November 22, 2005

getting flrxd

By the time I get home today I expect my home will be crawling (in some cases, literally) with relatives, breaking in the new rugs and crashing out in our computer room.  In that this might preclude me from blogging at will, I figured I’d throw down right now and get it over with. 

Because here’s the thing: I have to say goodbye.  No, not to you good people, I still have a dirty poem or two left to share with you.  Rather, I’m saying goodbye to the spongy floormats.  Let me elucidate:

Zach needed something to come between his hard toys and his hard noggin, and our hard floor.  What we found was a really inexpensive set of colorful rubber spongy mats with cutout sides that fit together in a big six-by-six grid.  Each individual piece is about one foot square, and has a separate foam letter or number stamped in the middle like a puzzle piece.  If you read across the whole thing from left to right and top to bottom, they spell out the
alphabet and the cardinal numbers.  (not the ordinal numbers. don’t make trouble, troublemaker.) The squares have a primary color, and the letter or number that fits in the middle is a different color.  Colors run in bands from top to bottom, so all the squares on the far left are yellow with blue letters and numbers in the middle, and that sort of pattern continues right across the whole thing. 

Naturally, if you want to spell out the alphabet in order, you need to make sure all the vertical bands are color-coordiated.  However, these were inexpensive floor mats for a reason: they actually got the order of the numbers wrong. After the alphabet is spelled out, the numbers on the bottom row skip around from 4 to 6 to 9 to 7 to 5 to 8.  This makes the whole assembly somewhat the opposite of educational.  It misteaches youth. 

Hey, we gotta keep whatever advantage we can.  Those bastards are already too smart.  This was not my favorite feature of this item, though.  My favorite feature was that, since the vertical columns (not the horizontal columns, troublemaker) are all color-coordinated, it looks as if you’re supposed to read it in columns rather than in rows.  In other words, instead of reading the alphabet and the numbers, it sort of looks like it says (in columns):

AGMSY4
BHNTZ6
CIOU09
DJPV17
EKQW25
and my personal favorite: FLRX38.

We can’t use the mats any longer.  Zach is too active and he just scrambles off of them the instant we set him down; they’re hard to keep clean and the pieces keep coming apart and Zach has taken to chewing on them, which can lead to a delicious (but deadly!!) mouthful of colorful foam bits.  We’ve packed them up and it’s time to get rid of them.  The big purple rug will more than replace them as far as a floorcovering and baby-protection device is concerned. 

However, it’s just not “on message” the way the alpha-mats were.  So, here’s a special farewell to those amusing little messages my living room floor used to spell out for me.  CIOU, FLRX38. If they tell you you’re not fun, you can tell them from me that they’re all a bunch of BHNTZ.