natural toys for the older baby
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.
