A Letter to Fisher-Price

Dear Fisher-Price,
I greatly appreciate your Biblical Little People playsets; they provide a wonderful way for my children to play through what they are learning about in the Bible. My daughter loves her Little People Nativity set, and I love that she can play with it all over the house without worrying about breakage or choking. Even the Baby Jesus deserves a ride on the Christmas carousel occasionally, right? It always makes us sad when we pack them up and store them under the house until next Christmas, but we can relax knowing that Mary will take good care of the Baby Jesus during the long hot summer, stuffed in a cardboard box.

Last week, on our family vacation, we acquired the Little People Noah’s Ark set. We love it, too. The animals come in pairs, even the ladybugs painted on the zebras’ behinds and the birds roosting on the elephants’ heads. The ark is large enough to hold all of the animals and Noah inside, or a few of them can snap onto the deck so that they don’t fall off and drown in the First Flood. However, there is one flaw in your design. It was brought to my attention by my (almost) three-year-old daughter in the following conversation.

Ella: Mo-o-om, Noah needs a wife.
Me: (thinking she was on another cleaning spree) A wipe? Okay, I’ll get you a baby wipe in just a minute. Will a wet paper towel work?
Ella: No. A wife.
Me: A what?
Ella: Noah needs a wife.
Me: Oh. A wife! Hmm. Well, there wasn’t a wife in the box.
Ella: Why?
Me: I don’t know.
Ella: He needs a wife.

And so it went as I tried to find something to fill the wife’s place in the ark, but alas, I had not packed even one Polly Pocket or miniature princess in our four bags of toys that we brought on vacation with us. I even offered up the new Weeble to stand in as the wife, but that was unacceptable.

Then she brought to my attention the real flaw in the ark. There was a picture stuck inside it – of Noah and his wife. Now, I’m willing to overlook the technological inaccuracy of the suggestion that a photograph of Noah and his wife actually existed and hung inside the ark at the time that the Lord told Noah there was going to be a floody-floody, but did you really have to include a picture of the wife you failed to include in the playset? I can’t even substitute another toy for her because we don’t have a princess with gray, curly hair and head band.

So, Fisher-Price Toy-making People, I appeal to you: Please, please create a wife for Noah. If you’ll do that, I promise to donate my set to the local church nursery and buy a new one, wife included. Better yet, could you just mold one extra while you are re-engineering the set and send her to me? I don’t think I can continue to have the “where is Noah’s wife?” conversation for the next five years.

Sincerely,

Amanda