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.)

Do toys grow on trees daddy?

Well, my little daughter (who really phrased this question as a mmmmmbaaaaa, ’cause she’s only 1 and can’t speak yet), normally, toys do not grow on trees. They grow in shops called Mothercare and ELC and on the internet in virtual shopping malls. Then they get delivered to us in dehydrated form and we add water by drooling over their magnificence for a while and hey presto, new toys.

Except today, because today, your mother, bless her, brought home from your walk several pine cones. Now you wouldn’t think pine cones would be a good tot toy would you? I mean, there isn’t much to recommend them. At least not according to the baby Einstein promo DVD we watched. After all, pine cones are not brightly coloured. Nor do they make much of a sound when shaken. And they certainly do not pop into your DVD player and mesmerise your little darling for hours on end while you get on with parent stuff. On the other hand, pine cones are brown, by and large, and have strange stick out parts to them.And let me tell you, the amount of fun we had picking them up off the playmat and placing them on the bench in the garden and then climbing up onto the bench (with a boost from dad) and then placing them on the table in a very tot-determined way and then finally throwing them onto the ground and starting the cycle all over again is absolutely astounding. Who would have thought something so cheap…..something so free in fact, would entertain my little thing for so long.

But she had loads of fun. Even when dad rather meanly interrupted our game by half-inching a few pine cones just as we stacked them ever so carefully on the bench. Well there was nothing for it but to point at them in dad’s hand…..and demand them back. Whereupon they were restored to their rightful place on the bench before we asked for a little boost up (”mmmmmbbbbbbaaaaa?”) so we could continue the little happy triumvirate of pine cone destinations. Heck we played all the way till lunch, after which we were preeeeeety tired and needed an afternoon nap. Luckily, since pine cones happily sit in the garden at various heights while looking rather like garden decorations debonairly scattered, there was no toy clean up while she slept and dad got a nap as well 🙂