Significant conversation in the Snyder household has centered around exactly what the hell this creature is:



Not the pink one. The purple-and-yellow one. All we know about it is that it hangs upside-down and sings "Polly Wolly Doodle" to any baby muscular and coordinated enough to grab it and yank it real hard. La Diva believes it's a monkey. As in "Today he pulled the monkey and it sang to him!"

Monkey didn't seem right to me. I took a closer look at what seems to be—possibly—a variation on the same critter:



Not the pink one. The red-and-white one.

"It's a large-breasted panda," I said.

This made sense. A large-breasted panda would be the perfect animal for a baby product. To a baby, pandas are cute and cuddly, and large breasts are lunch.

But that probably wasn't it, either, so I did searches on monkey and panda and all the other google-variations I could think of, and came up with nothing.

The style looks Japanese. On the assumption that Fisher-Price toys were assembled in Asia somewhere, I added "Japan" to the search terms and still came up with nothing.

As it turns out (says the tired daddy, far too many Google searches later), it's German. It's an "Affehiebbär." (Literally: Monkeybatbear.)

Why an Affehiebbär would want to hang upside-down and sing Polly Wolly Doodle to little American babies is anyone's guess. But on the upside, at least it doesn't sing polka music.

Danken sie God for small miracles (pah-pah, OOM pah-pah...)


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