little feet, big sky

Now that Spice is practically a toddler, it’s been a challenge finding natural, non-electronic toys that are age-appropriate and interesting.

The Uncle Goose blocks have been a total hit. While she’s too young to stack them yet, we have a slick little game where I make columns of 5 blocks all around the room and she knocks them down. Sometimes we go for broke and I try to see how high I can build before she bulldozes my tower.

Next up would be this pushcart. It actually belonged to my aunt’s (in the UK) neighbor’s son, who is now twenty, so this is a classic homemade toy. I sometimes see modern ones going for upwards of $80! This one holds most of her Uncle Goose blocks perfectly and she’s starting to get the hang of pushing it slowly while walking. In the meantime, it’s fun to bang on and put things in and out of.

Her Boon FrogPod with bathtoys isn’t at all natural, but it fits in the categories of ‘unusual’ and ‘toys’. The FrogPod fits the shower wall and stashes all her bath goodies. Some parents might find a nearly two-foot-tall green plastic frog in their shower to be an eyesore, but our bathroom is yellow rubber ducky -themed, so we’re hardly ones to judge. The bath goods themselves are these non-mildewing foam shapes that stack, float and stick to bathtub and tile walls. She chews on them, slaps them together and pulls them off the walls faster than I can stick them back up.

We prefer wooden toys since the spouse was Waldorf-educated and I’m not fond of over-sized plastic, electronic toys. I wish I could make them myself since they’re crazy expensive, but it’s time-consuming to do properly, so I just try to buy selectively. I generally like Moolka for their selection of natural toys, but from a Waldorf perspective, most of the toys still don’t leave much left for the imagination.

@livesinthetub got her the lovely soft duck below before she was born and with the crinkly material inside, it’s a solid favorite. The little wooden elephant she’s playing with up top is actually one of the spouse-unit’s from when he was a boy. Maybe that’s the charm of natural toys, that they’ll always be endearing to future generations.

I recently bought Spice a lovely set of alphabet blocks from Uncle Goose ($32). These blocks are just gorgeous and would make an excellent baby shower gift. Uncle Goose only makes blocks and their sustainable Michigan basswood blocks meet U.S. and European safety standards and are made with non-toxic inks.

Each block is 1-3/4 inches square, and the sides vary in their designs: two embossed sides per block, letters, numbers & numeral names, and animal pictures with their names. They’re light but solid and feel sturdy, and I can imagine passing them down to other kids in the future.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, Uncle Goose also makes Braille blocks, Nursery Rhyme blocks, and foreign language blocks for languages such as Russian, Danish, Arabic and Chinese.

One of the other moms in our playgroup had the nifty Sophie the Giraffe teether by Vulli. This thing is like kiddie crack to babies that are teething. It’s simple and made of natural rubber, but it has all the right angles to make it easy to grab and a small squeaker inside to make it interesting once in a while. It’s also small and thin enough to tuck inside the wrap or baby carrier with Spice so that she has something else to grab and chew on other than my hair. :-)

They don’t seem to have them listed on the website, but I found these awesome hand puppets at IKEA for an amazing $4 each. I picked up a lamb, pig, chicken and fish, but I don’t remember what the other ones where. Cute, machine washable and great fun for playing with babies.

A great tip I heard before Spice was born was to keep an extra ‘lovey’, or favorite toy, around in case the original is irreparably damaged or lost. I have two JellyCat elephants for Spice’s lovey, and quietly rotate them for play and wash so that they wear out evenly. :-)

I know I can’t entirely pick her favorite toy, but I can certainly encourage it while she’s a baby. We’ve had Elle since before Spice was born, so it’s been in many baby pictures so that she’ll be able to remember it long afterwards. Elle came along to England with us for Christmas, and I make sure that it gets tucked in for naps. I want to crochet a harness for Elle so that I can attach it to Spice’s car seat, or baby carrier when we’re out, and when she’s older, I’ll make a doll sling or wrap so that Spice can “wear” Elle. :-)

What’s really neat is that as Spice transitions out of swaddling, her free hands grab on to Elle more and more, so I have a feeling my crazy plans are actually working a little. :-)