Zatera Ul

I was letting OLC play with the old Suzy Homemaker oven that my sister and I used to play with at my grandparents’ house, but forty-year-old turquoise plastic doesn’t stand up to a toddler very well, and I decided to salvage the burners and knobs, and make her a new toy stove.

I knew that the oven had a 100 watt bulb inside and could be used for baking little things, like an Easy-bake oven; not that we were ever allowed to plug it in. When OLC inherited it, I just cut the cord right off, and took the bulb out. What I didn’t know, until I started taking the stove apart, was that all the knobs were functional. The oven knob turns the oven on and off, like you might expect. [Correction: It doesn't do anything; you would turn on the oven bulb by plugging the stove in.] But the burner knobs actually open and close vents to the oven chamber under the burners, so the kid could turn the burners “on” and “off” and (slightly) warm things on the stovetop. Also, there’s a door latch and heat indicator that switch on as the oven heats up, so it can’t be opened when it’s too hot. A good design, much cooler than I had realized, but sadly not in step with “modern safety standards”*.

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*I went into this subject in my book a bit, about how practices that were common even ten years ago, such as buying used car seats and using them for a few more years, are now greeted with gasps of horror. “Safety inflation” is what I called it. It adds quite a bit to the cost of raising a child.