Learning Worm

One of our old neighbors was sending some stuff to the D.I. the other day and asked if we wanted to look through the toys before she sent them off. One of the "new" toys we received was a purple worm/caterpillar with 26 legs... one for each letter of the alphabet.

Well, of course, Betsy and I end up playing with this worm just as much as the kids do. I mean, c'mon. It's a new toy and it's pretty cool. It has a few different settings on it. One setting will say the letter of the alphabet when you push on the leg. Another setting will play a short song for each leg. The most enjoyable setting is the one that says the sound of the letter when you push the leg.

We don't really need to discuss how this ended up happening or anything, but at some point Betsy and I decided to push three letters in rapid succession and see if it sounded like the worm was actually SAYING the word we were spelling.

Here I am sounding out the word "fun":


Then we tried the word "car":


Doesn't work quite as well because it says the wrong sound for "a".

Eventually we got bored spelling normal words and decided to see have the worm say some nasty words. I really hope that other parents do this kind of thing. I actually think it's funny to picture my parents doing stuff like this with my toys when I was five years old. I don't know if my parents did this or if Betsy and I are just weird that way.

Apparently, the makers of this Learning Worm figured that an older brother (or maybe a parent) would try to spell bad words so they programmed in a "safety".

This is what happened when we pushed "c", "o", "k":



And "f", "u", "c":



Betsy even got creative while I was taping these and said "When it says the 'f' sound, it doesn't just go 'fffff'... it actually says "fffu'. So let's just try 'f' and then 'k'." Well we tried that, as well:


That's right. The makers thought of everything. It doesn't say the last sound. Instead the worm giggles and says "That tickles." It totally ruined all our horrible parenting fun. Those savages.