"Take it back!" Randy said after he'd assembled the Fisher Price "Racin' Ramps Garage" that one of our daughters got for Christmas.

"This thing is nothing like the one I had when I was little. Look at the car elevator," he said, using two hands to slide the lift up and down. "I can't even get it to work, how could a little kid do it? Mine had a lever. And listen to this bell -- pathetic! There isn't even a place for a car to go down the ramp from the second level. I can't believe how terrible it is. Can't we buy one like the toy I used to have?"

Well, no, we couldn't. In fact, I knew we couldn't, because I had done lots of research on this little toy before I plunked down $20 for it at Target, and many reviewers said the same things my husband complained about the day after Christmas: "Why don't they make toys like they used to?" and "We bought this for my son, but mine was so much better." But there I was, standing in the aisle, talking on the cell to Randy, remembering all the fun times I had with the old toy, too, and asking him, "Should I get it? They have the farm too. Maybe I should get the farm instead. But then again, this is a classic. You have to go with the classic, right?"

"Yeah. Go with the classic," he told me.

So we went with the classic. And the classic went back to Target on Dec. 26, unused and unloved by all.

By the time Randy had checked out the third Christmas toy -- a preschooler's digital camera -- that didn't meet his quality approval ("This thing says it's 2.0 megapixels, but there's no way!"), I had to wonder if we were maybe just a little bit too caught up in this toy thing. Maybe we were overthinking it just a trifle, I thought.

While her father complained about the color quality of the photos he had downloaded from her camera, MJ happily walked around snapping shots of her sister and her Christmas haul, feeling pretty proud of herself. Feeling like a big girl. (And forgetting, for a moment, anyway, that she had managed to come down with pneumonia on Christmas Day. Yes, pneumonia. On Christmas.) She didn't care that every picture she took looked like the back of a cave. That's because she has a little thing that Randy and I seem to forget more and more between bouts of croup and ongoing sleepless nights: imagination. She wasn't a three-year-old with an overpriced kid's camera. She was a professional photographer, and loving it.

Parents seem to ask a lot of their children's playthings, but children themselves require very little from their toys. Many reviews for kid's toys start out something like this: "The toy is OK, but not made like the one I had. It's too loud and annoying and it was a beast to put together," and end something like this: "I gave it two out of five stars, but only because my it's my daughter's favorite toy ever."

Which, of course, is the point. A point that I, like so many other parents, tend to forget from time to time. We're used to demanding quality in the things we purchase for ourselves; but we're not really qualified to define what sparks the very personal imagination of a preschooler. Parents have too much baggage. Too much information. Too much nostalgia for the past. Some of us (Randy) want the toys in our house to behave themselves and act the way we want them to, and some of us (me) want our kids to play with them exactly as the box promises they will. Or play with them, period. Good luck with that.

So Randy reconciled himself with the notion that MJ wasn't really interested in enlarging her photos to poster size and hanging them on the wall. And I replaced the garage with a comparable plastic monster: an amusement park and ferris wheel ... which sat by itself, nearly unnoticed, for three days. MJ's favorite toys this week, besides the camera? A two-inch-high Tigger and a plush Rudolph I bought on a whim the day before Christmas. I never would have guessed. But then, that's why she's the kid, and I'm just the mommy.

Beth appears Tuesdays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Beth at her blog MotherBunker.