Pick the Chinchilla Out of the Lineup

Disclosure

When we walk into a pet store, my girls go crazy.  Doesn’t matter the animal, they love it.  If we let them, they would spend hours looking at all the different kinds of fish, reptiles, rodents, birds and dogs/cats if they happen to have any.  Me? I love animals, but hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, mice.  They’re all the same to me.

So you can imagine my surprise when we walked into the pet store the other day to find a chinchilla.  I picked up Miss K so she could see it and she immediately yelled “CHINCHILLA!”  Honestly, can you pick the chinchilla out?  Here – try.

Okay, fine. They don’t all look the same.  But I’m 38 and she’s 4.  I don’t think I even knew what a chinchilla was until I was much older.  Even then I only knew that it was used for making coats. How is it that a 4 year old can identify a chinchilla?   (For those of you who didn’t know, it’s the second one.)This is how:

The magical world of Littlest Pet Shop!  We have so many of them that we finally needed to throw them all in a backpack just to keep them from getting lost.  We own a showcase but it’s too small to fit them all!  It’s where the pets vacation when they aren’t in the backpack.

Littlest Pet Shop is one of the few toys that both Miss M and Miss K love to play with.  Not only do we have an entire zoo of them, but we also have puzzles, a magnetic activity book, the Wii game and now a set of VIP friends.

So what’s the big deal about them?  They are extremely cute.  Thank goodness I didn’t develop a collector’s eye for them or we would own even more.  I thought they were adorable before, but they now have a new look – more character in their eyes.  We just received the skunk and I had to laugh when Miss M ran around chasing and spraying Miss K and all the other pets.  I didn’t realize she knew that skunks did that!

We also received a package of Virtual Interactive Pets (VIPs).  Check out the Littlest Pet Shop VIPs video so you know exactly what they are. They are cuddly stuffed pets with interactive codes for playing their virtual counterpart online.  I’m sure they were designed to compete with Webkins, but since we don’t let the kids use those codes either, I really can’t compare.  When we opened these up, Miss M gleefully yelled “These are for online.”  I asked her how she knew that and she said “I saw it on TV.”  Marketing people sure know their stuff, eh?  Between being busy, being sick and blogging, I haven’t been willing to part with my computer for the LPS online world.  Not as much for Miss M’s sake, but from what some friends of mine have told me, it’s addicting even for adults.  Despite Miss M’s pleas of “Can we online them?” I think we are best waiting until Christmas break before we unveil the codes and the website.  Regardless of their online feature, both Miss M and Miss K can regularly be found playing, cuddling and sleeping with their VIPs.

If you’re interested in my opinion of the Littlest Pet Shop game for the Wii, you’ll have to stay tuned for another post.  It’s a whole story by itself.  Honestly, I love the game and can’t wait to get that blog post together to share with you!

Littlest Pet Shop is a fun series of products incorporating the original toys, the VIPs, puzzles and other products that I previously mentioned that we own.  But also branching out into other forms of media such as the Littlest Pet Shop Digital Planner.  The variety of products span several ages so you won’t have to worry about your child ‘outgrowing’ Littlest Pet Shop products for years to come.

Just think… you’ll be able to pick a chinchilla out of the crowd in no time… maybe even as quickly as your kid.