It is very common that children's toys suffer from occasional damage from time to time. The hours they spend with them, the trot What they give them, experimentation and even throwing or throwing them to see what happens (or when they get angry) are some of the causes that many toys and stories end up broken.
Some are repairable and others are not. Some may end up in the trash, because they are irremediable or because they have become dangerous when they break and others may continue with their wanderings.
For all of them we can create an intermediate place that allows us to have some time to buy the materials that will fix it or to see that the toys need some love to heal. This place is the toy hospital. A few days ago one of Jon's stories (my son) broke. My wife wanted to fix it, but days ago I changed the location of the heat and the scissors for security reasons, and she didn't know how to find them. For this waiting time I remembered an entry I had read some time ago in Max and Lola's blog and decided to do the same.
I took a shoebox I had and I hit a red cross on the lid to baptize her as the toy hospital. We took the story and a car that had long since had the spoiler broken and put them inside. The day we can, we will sit the guard personnel at that time and attend to the injured.
The toy hospital can be a simple game, without more, or many other things if we want. Being a hospital, both parents and children can work as health workers and we can take advantage of these moments to cure to toys, put the thermometer on them, give them syrup, listen to them, give them vaccines, ... and normalize a little bit all the situations that they usually live in the doctor's office.
Another utility that I see is that it can serve as a tool for them to see that when a toy breaks, it may need a more or less short (or long) time to be repaired and that sometimes, even being repaired, it loses some functions, thus promoting responsibility for the care of their own belongings.
It is also to add a moment to sit with our children and play together to attend to the toys: "Doctor Jon, how do you see the gray car? And the chicken, will it recover its head?"
On the subject of broken toys I remember a wonderful phrase of Victor Hugo, who commented as a curiosity, which says: "When the boy destroys his toy, he seems to be looking for his soul", in allusion that sometimes you have to open and disassemble things to know them (and children, if they want something, is to know).
