Three cheap, homemade toy ideas

Old curtain rings
We were clearing out the shed…and I found a bagful of wooden curtain rings. Looks like a bagful of new, exciting dangly things I can attach to the pram with a string, says I to myself. (Pram danglers lose their allure quite quickly. An on-the-ball mum would revise and replace twice a week.) Presto, once rinsed and repeated, a dangly chain of ringy things to chew and wave and jingle…

Does her cot hang low?
Do things dangle to and fro? Have you tied them with a knot? Have you tied them with a bow? I refer to the base of the side bars. There’s no reason your baby’s room should be interesting only if she’s IN her cot. Attach anything with a hole in it or hook on it to the base of the side bars, and she can explore them while you change her nappy (once you have given up changing your little wriggler on the cot-top changer, that is) or simply while crawling around her room. Ours has some soft toy animals repurposed from her baby playgym, some Sticklebricks, some buggybooks, a ball…

Surprise jars
Use any sturdy, transparent, screw-lid container, and fill with something visually interesting. Beads, buttons, ribbons, a Duplo man, a dried flower…then (if the contents are potentially fatal to your twisty-fingered child), stick the lid on forever by squirting glue into the threads before screwing it on tight. Another good idea is to part-fill with water, and add a squeeze of Fairy liquid. Shaking it will cause chortle-inducing froth that slowly settles. For opaque containers, fill with objects that rattle, such as dried chickpeas, rice, and so on. (The Body Shop body butter containers are good for these.)

Cunning

I’m not sure what it is about being a baby that makes them develop cunning so early. Perhaps it’s that they have no concept of what is and what isn’t their’s. Witness my little one. She loves lights. They are, to her, completely magical. She gazes on them in awe, smiling with a half opened mouth. She also loves my mobile phone. Partly because when you push a button the screen lights up. Partly because it’s plastic and so, nice to chew when her gums are itchy. And partly, no doubt, because my screen features a lovely little picture of her*, so I imagine it must be fun to gaze upon this magical miniature mirror.

Anyway, t’other day, she snuck up on me and snaffled my mobile while I was making a few notes. Being a good father, I let her play with it for a while and then needed to make a call. I point at my phone and say “Please give daddy his mobile” (never too young to teach them manners I say). Actually, I said “mmmmba”. Because that’s what my daughter says when she points at something that she wants to play with that I’m holding.

Now, I know she understands me. I see her look me in the eyes, her tongue sticks out a little in concentration. She looks at the mobile. Then she looks around. I can see her thinking. And this is the best part. She picks up a different toy – a little wooden block, and offers it to me saying “here daddy, is this what you want?”, and she bats her eyelids. Actually, she say “ba” ’cause she’s only 13 months old.

How did she learn this? How did she learn to try and distract me so she can continue to play with what she really wants to play with? I didn’t teach her this, that’s for sure. Maybe her mother did. Women are, after all, cunning.

Now of course, I could wade in and take my phone by force. That would work…..but really, I see only one real cunning solution to me getting my phone back. Buy two new phones. Once she has a phone in each hand, there will be one left over for me to use.

*(yup, it’s true, as a new father, you will also remove the pictures of scantily clad women that once adorned your mobile’s screen in favour of your little one’s smiling face)