It is 11 p.m. and Little Leapfrog is splayed on my living room floor like an unwanted guest who drank his weight in mojitos at the New Year's party. At least Froggy's lifeless green body is quiet. It's usually babbling the ABCs or spewing forth some consonant or vowel as my daughter frantically urges me to punch the letters on his stomach.

This frog helps Kate learn the alphabet. But in the process, he and his blabbing brethren of talking toys are driving me insane. It's no wonder I suck down a five o'clock Chardonnay to take the edge off as Lil Leap and his evil ilk count, bleat, beep and croon.

To come clean, this was my fault. I thought these toys were educational and fun, so I registered for them. That's how the fat Frog, a barn with magnetic animals, a musical Leap Table, a stuffed singing caterpillar and a plastic pull toy caterpillar ended up in our house. I figured they'd be good enough for our 13-month-old.

Good enough? There's no such thing when you're an organic-obsessed affluent San Francisco mommy with access to a Google search engine. I came to realize this mighty quickly when I ran into mommies who really do believe that plastic toys are the environment-ruining devil and talking toys his brain-development stunting spawn.

These mommies subscribe to Real Simple, boycott Pampers, and line their living rooms with Haba wooden cars, natural fiber books and Peruvian free trade cloth dolls. They make my choice in toys, for a brief time, just another niggling thing to worry about in the shower, along with fears that Kate's space heater would catch fire at 4 a.m. or that her limbs will retract because she spits up most vegetables.

My fretting started after a visit to the house of a friend, a sassy, smart vegetarian who sneaks flax seed in most everything her daughter eats to increase her brain development. She wants to start a pre-school co-op so she has control over her daughter's early education. I am truly in awe of her ambition and energy. I scan her living room floor. There's a basket of soft cloth books mixed with some wood toys, some puppets and an abacus. I don't see any plastic. There is no Little Leap frog. No toys that talk or bleep. I do not bring this up, but when this friend emails links to websites that offer all sorts of European toys that I do not own, I start to wonder about our Fisher Price and Leap Fleet. Was I missing something?

Another morning I send Kate off to a daycare exchange with her talking "See 'n Say" wheel. The sweet boy she is visiting played with the See 'n Say at our house the week before and loved it. When I return to get Kate, his mom hands me the toy in a rumpled plastic bag like it's a poopy diaper. "I'm trying to get these sorts of toys out of the house," she says. She asks me not to bring such a toy again.

I am mortified but also a bit pissed off. It's just a stupid See 'n Say that makes barnyard sounds, but I refrain from telling her this out of I'm-a-chick niceness. You'd think I'd fed her kid Safeway conventional grapes. I grab the bag and start to wonder why I was never briefed about the "plastic is the devil" people.

At Kate's playgroup I ask the director, a child development professor, if these talking toys we've acquired do anything to help Kate learn. "Kids don't necessarily need talking toys if you already talk to them a lot," she tells me. Talking toys won't harm her, she adds, but they are best used when a child is attention deprived.

Attention deprived child? Kate is definitely not attention deprived. I talk to her all of the time. I can't shut up. If Leap Frog is doing her no harm, why should she give him up? I had a talking Mrs. Beasley when I was a kid and I turned out OK. Besides, not all her toys talk. Her favorite toy, a stuffed bear, doesn't make a peep. Her second favorite, jumbo plastic Lego blocks, are pretty quiet, too.

Little Leap is not, which is one reason why I loathe him. He is a doofy-looking thing about half her size, but wider, who sings the ABCs to an exciting back beat. Kate feared him at first, whimpering when I plopped him near her. But she warmed up soon enough, inching herself closer and closer, finally directing me to push the circle on his fat finger and sing along with her--over and over and over.

I am pondering just how asinine I'd look to one of my single friends when she belts out an "Mmmmmmmm" for "M," and I am momentarily happy. She is learning! She will go to Stanford early admission!! She will take care of her writer parents in their toothless golden years!

Kate also adores her Farmer Tad barn, which sits on our refrigerator. "Hi! I'm farmer Tad. Listen to my banjo!!!!" Tad squeaks. Never mind that there is probably no farmer in the western hemisphere with a stupid name like Tad, whose job it is to shepherd children as they match a horse head to the horse ass in the plastic barn.

"You made a match," Tad's associate sings when Kate does it right. "Look what you found! You made a match, hear a cow sound!"

"MOOOOO," groans a cow that sounds drugged.

Thankfully, this toy does not sing the ABCs. It simply reinforces the strange fantasy children have of modern farming.

This is OK. And it's OK that these toys make my teeth grind, too. Kids are supposed to play with annoying toys. They're kids. I figure that until she's in preschool, she and I will have a deal: she gets to keep most of her talking army (OK, I tossed a talking Pooh Bear who begged me to pick him up one too many times and a Rock with Elmo guitar when the batteries kicked) in exchange for a ban on all toddler DVDs. That's a fair exchange, I think, even though Kate seems to hate TV. Her first brush with an Elmo video left her with a serious case of ennui. She lasted five minutes.

The next month I attend a Superbowl party at another friend's house. Their daughter is just a few months older then Kate, a cherubic toddler who at 2 is already speaking in sentences. Her father is a professor who specializes in child development, so I am anxious to see what sort of toys his daughter uses. I am in luck. After the game, all the parents head into the little girl's room to sit with all the kids. I quickly scan the room. There are books. There are too many puzzles to count. Puzzles with numbers, letters, animals, shapes, butterflies. The professor confirms that puzzles are great for their brains at this age and I don't have a problem with that.

The only problem is that, at best, Kate only has two puzzles, which means she might be falling behind, which is the fear of all urban moms everywhere. I am sure there will be a mandatory puzzle test to get her to get into the best preschool.

The next day, I rush to Target and find two natural wood puzzles. One has the numbers one to 20 marked on pieces with pictures of ladybugs, balloons and flowers and the like; the other is the letters of the alphabet.

When I get the puzzles home, I unwrap them and leave them for Kate. After ambling over to check them out, Kate immediately dumps the parts on the floor and heads to the kitchen cabinet. There, she pulls out a green plastic colander and puts it on her head.

On this day, at least, she seems to prefer plastic.

Kim Girard is a San Francisco-based freelance writer who has covered business and technology for 10 years. She enjoys writing essays, cooking things other than macaroni, swimming far from the kiddie pool and eating her daughter's lunches.