Beck Vass: Don't buy these for your kids

Kids love their colourful Disney-themed plasters a bit too much. Photo / Getty Images

It started out like a typical Wednesday. In fact, it was better than usual. The new sticker "to do" list I made for the kids seems to be helping add some structure to our days.

I know - sticker charts - I am creating selfish, entitled children who watch too much tv and will never eat enough quinoa.

I was cleaning my teeth, about to leave the house when I hear our son, two, crying. I keep brushing my teeth because it is so standard that someone is crying that I basically only run if someone is screaming.

Even then, I often wait because our four-year-old girl screams a lot.

My electric toothbrush went through two 45-second cycles while he was kind of whimper-crying "my toe, my toe" while I was thinking "just a minute."
A minute and thirty seconds, it turns out.

I emerged from the bathroom to find my son sitting down holding his middle toe with the tip hanging by a flap. Guilt!

I have no idea what he did it on and he hasn't been able to tell me. Then, right as we were really needing to leave the house, we lost 15 minutes over what plaster could be on it - Elsa from Frozen or a Minion.

Here's a tip for free - never buy the branded movie plasters. You go through a $4 packet every week on "injuries" that aren't even cuts or, if you say no, arguments over why not, why not?

It's a horrible waste of emotional energy fighting with irrational, tiny people who try to bite you for giving them Olaf the snowman when they really wanted princess Anna.

Then, when someone's toe tip has been stubbed almost-off and they are actually bleeding you have a 15-minute battle over what character is allowed and then their uninjured sibling starts screaming because they want one too.

I can count - literally on one finger - the number of times one of these things has stayed on, and it was on my own finger.

It's also an awful waste of money. I just did the math and it's cost almost 27 cents every time I have caved and given them one only for them to take it off four seconds later because "Its funny, it's funny". The only people finding anything funny are the people at Disney.

I'd complain but those guys have bought me more sanity time than I care to admit so we probably owe them a lifetime of buying four-second plasters.

Maybe we'll use them for the sticker chart.