Do favorite toys predict career choices?

“Play is children’s work,” says Dr. William Sears, “and toys are their tools.”

So if you want your child to become an astronaut, I suppose you’d better pony up for that chemistry set. Perhaps we’ll have an onslaught of veterinarians 20 years from now, since thousands of children clamored for Santa to bring them Zhu Zhu pets, those mechanical hamsters.

Since columnists spend this month prognosticating, I’m going to throw out a prediction. Desi will either run away to join the circus, become a professional athlete, a fortune-teller or pool shark.

Why? At age 1, my child is obsessed with balls.

Ball was the first inanimate object she recognized and named. Sure, she said Mama, Dada and dog, but we’re in her face all the time. She was showered with stuffed animals, noisemakers and whatsits but prefers the world’s simplest action toy.

She asks for a ball, lights up when she sees one and points at it – that universal toddler gesture for “Hey! Gimme that!”

I bought her a real baseball and secondhand mitt. As soon as she could sit up, we were rolling the ball back and forth to her across the floor. It’s one of a dozen or so now in her collection.

I reason that the balls are good for developing motor skills and interacting with others: Put the ball in a cup. Dump it out. Repeat. Play catch, or perhaps more accurately, fetch. She’s even become an all-star at crawling with a ball in one hand.

Balls seem to materialize for her, much like the over-eager retriever who roots out a mangled tennis ball on every walk. We were in the produce aisle of the grocery store the other day, and Desi looked around in wonderment and said “Ball!” Oranges, tomatoes, onions, cantaloupes. I swear I haven’t dropped her directly on her head. We bought an onion – smelly ball? – which she held until I wrested it away for checkout.

Balls extend to her room decor: polka dots. She has two round, puffy couch pillows that resemble cheerleader pom-poms, and calls those balls. I’m sure as soon as she will wear mittens, she’ll like snowballs, although her initial reaction to packed snow was lukewarm.

Before a ball became the be-all and end-all, Desi liked to play with other low-tech items: the plastic tops of Gerber baby food containers, spoons. There’s really no need to drop a bundle on toys, I’ve discovered.

My friend Jen Solis’ child, Sully, became transfixed by trains when he was 18 months old. A year later, and he’s still cuckoo for choo-choos. They’ve helped him focus and hone motor skills, his mom says. “He’ll play intently with the train for hours if we let him,” Solis said, and Sully also loves to watch videos about toy trains on YouTube. “Sully watches those studiously, like he is plotting his own episode.”

Maybe Sully will become a mechanical engineer, a transportation expert or a conductor. He’s extremely organized when creating a track pattern, so the Solis family is guessing he might excel at business. “Whatever he ends up doing, I am certain that some of these train building/playing skills will be utilized,” Solis said.

Marianne Szymanski, author of A Parent’s Essential Guide to Smart Toy Choices, says good toys should promote imagination, motor skills, self-esteem or speech. I think that so far, Desi’s motor skills are promoting self-esteem. Let’s hope that continues through middle school.

Her favorite Christmas morning toy was a cardboard box that housed a countertop appliance. She leapt up on it, body surfed for a few seconds, slid down, repeated.

Desi also likes to dance to any kind of music, and those annoying holiday singing toys entrance her. She does her special version of the Twist: seated position, palms up, furious trunk rotation, big smile.

As she’s learning self-propulsion these days, Desi has a couple of toys that she can walk behind. One has alligators that clack their wooden snouts as the contraption rolls, and she’s started to put a ball inside a tin can on top of the gators so they make a terrific noise. Another plays music and teaches shapes and colors. Her friend Jesse Chambers has a lawnmower-style push toy, and Aundra Guttormson has one that carts around a crate of wooden blocks.

Sears says toys are for adults, too. “Give toys that you will enjoy playing with, and then take time to play with your child.”

I like to play catch as much as the next gal, but the only way I can see myself enjoying her walk-behind toys is if they had a higher purpose. I’m sure I could make millions if I could invent one that doubles as a vacuum cleaner or even had a Swiffer cloth underneath.

Although Andy and Jean Schwartz owned Jackson’s toy store for two decades, their children didn’t run amok around Broadway Toys, Jean said. “My kids didn’t really play with toys,” Jean said. “They were more social. They played with other kids.” But she does recommend a toy almost as old as the ball. “I think wooden blocks are your best bet.”

They’re on our wish list. Maybe we can convince Desi that a letter-embossed cube is the new sphere. Then she might have a shot at architecture, or at least bricklaying or journalism.

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Features editor Johanna Love writes on motherhood every other week in her spare time: when not stacking cups, singing the alphabet and turning around the push toy.