Toy office

We are a two and a half office family. My husband and I are both home office people. We used to share an office (and loved it), but nowadays my husband gets his own office, and I share my office witha 3.5 year old. About a year ago, Simon coined the term "toy office." As in "let's go into the toy office!" And that's what we do. I type, he plays. Toy. Office. It's a great term. Wonderful connotations, too. Good for encouraging a nice white-collar career path later in life. It's an office. You PLAY there. Yeah. But seriously, I've never really understood the role of women and their workplaces in American homes. We were, um, [insert ironic descriptive term here] enough to have bought a house in the dreaded year 2K real estate gargantua-price-extravaganza. As such, we like to keep an oar in by stopping by open houses sometimes. And in years of looking at Bay area homes, I have never seen a mom's office. Is that wierd or what? Maybe it's the socieconomic area? We looked a lot in Hillsborough and Atherton. But we recently looked (just for grins) at the 9,000 square foot, seven million dollar house down the street a bit. The house, confided the real estate agent, was bought with the proceeds of a well-timed stock sale. (The wife's.) She's involved in some other investments, too, and they commented that she's obviously a big part of the family's financial success. Does she have a home office? Not on your life. There is a large, leather and mahogany-lined masculine extravaganza of an office. There is a large toy room. A large home theatre. A big room next to the toy room, which oddly enough has a foosball game in it. There's a bedroom for the au pair, a large walk-in closet, a family room that you could house a Guatamalen family of 12 in ... and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the mom kept her life. Is it just me? Does nobody else need places and stuff and a workspace, and so forth? Is it a writer-ish thing? As I look, I have a fourteen-slot organizer, a bulletin board crammed with the requisite tacked-and-forgotten detritus, a hanging file thing, an in box, a four-drawer file cabinet (one entire drawer of which is filled with TRAVEL NOTES!), and so forth. I've always had a home office. I always will. Even if I just live in one room, there will be a table, a chair, and a typewriter (or similar data entry device). The thing that I always found really immensely scary are those upper middle class kitchens from the seventies and eighties with the cute little tiny desk built into the kitchen. In my opinion, that's like asking someone to nurse in the bathroom (but of course, that's just my knee-jerk side.) At any rate, this entire thing comes up because we went to a birthday party today. On the way out, Simon piped up with "where was the toy office?" Next week: "Where are the books?"