Rubinology Toy Safari

So when we moved into the new house, my wife kept on saying how it would be so much of a relief to finally have an 'adult' living room as we had a playroom set up downstairs for our two year old. 'Yeah right' I thought. This was Max - there are no bounds for his toy collection. And before you could say "Cars" and "Thomas the Tank Engine" there were Cars and Thomas the Tank Engine zachen all over the living room making it into a veritable chamber of ongoing bedlam.

Needless to say every now and then (a.k.a. every few hours) he misplaces one of the hundreds of items in the living room and NOTICES! Of course that leads to his demanding that "Mommy Daddy Mommy Daddy" find that particular one. Today, for example, he misplaced Sally, one of the Cars. He noticed this after carefully lining up all of his Cars in the first place (figure 1).



So now what? Well, he goes over to his Thomas collection and dumps it out on the floor to see if Sally's there (figure 2).



I'm glad that this is not a real event of course as there would be hundreds of lives lost in search of a single die-cast model car. But finally his parents, frantic to provide the crucial Cars car, bend on hand and knee to (successfully this time...) search for the elusive Sally (figure 3).