If you haven't already voiced concern to her about the toys, just ask her if you can have them back with no explaination other than you're being nostalgic. Then at a later time, bring a few toys or more you think are appropriate in a storage box to her house and say you're leaving them there for your child and all of the grandchildren to play with. If she balks and says the old ones are fine, say these are the hot new thing and leave it at that.
As for the "you're still alive" retort. Bottome line, even our own mothers and sometimes our in-laws have problems with change, and it manifests itself in an inevitable "power-struggle" of wills. AFterall, for 20 years more or less, they spent all of their energy telling you how to be safe.
For some grandparents, acknowledging their own children's abilities as competent parents somehow translates into they are nolonger relevant or important. For some they don't hear the "this needs to be done because it is the latest recommended safety regulations on gates and steps." Somehow their brain translates it into "You're geriatric! You're a dottering old geezer on alzheimer's doorstep! Just shut up with your nonsense and go sit down in your Lark and play Yatzee, clap on your Clapper, or call Colonial Penn!"
While I totally agree that our parents should respect our own wishes as parents and help us in anyway we see fit, we too should be mindful of our parents' perspective on things as well.
I know it's a lot of work, but depending on the temperament of your parent, perhaps strike up a conversation about something you've seen on the news about the safety issue you're concerned about. Unfortunately, just about every concievable accident on earth has a correlating story in the news. Then say, "It's because of the news story about the baby that fell to their death from a 2nd story window we're putting gates on our 2nd story windows. Since you babysit Jake on weekdays and he sleeps in your 2nd story spare room, would you be okay if we get one for the spare room here too? We'd feel alot better."
Doing it this way is less judgemental, and because you present a convincing case, they won't have as strong of an argument if they try to push back. In fact, they'd feel rather remiss.
If you have a particularly crusty and mean parent like me...this approach sometimes won't work. You'll just get a lot of cursing and I'm not letting anyone make changes in my house etc. Then you can pull rank and say, "I hope you won't be offended then if we don't leave Jake here, when we're not present. We feel that strongly about his environment being safe."
We had to do this with my FIL. We found out he wasn't using the car seats with our toddlers when driving them around because he didn't want to be bothered with installing them in his car. Instead, he just belted them in with no booster like an adult. I flipped! I threatened to report him to the police for endangerment. He never did it again.
Parents won't like it, it might get touchy, but they will come around if you don't back down.
Good luck. This is a tough one. But don't give in, because safety is your uttmost priority as the parent. And even though grandparents like to think they can trump the parents, you as mom have the final say.
