toys that never stop

We have a mountain of toys. You have only to look at the piles of funky recycled materials on any of the ‘alternative building’ posts to see that Paul has a mania for collecting. And, living where we do, the yard sales are ripe picking for piles of cool-ass toys, all for next to nothing. Our kids don’t know how abundantly they live, nor on what an astonishing shoestring this abundance is visited upon them! Which is just as it should be, if you ask me.

Still, amidst the snow drifts of toys in every corner of the yurt (wait a minute! yurts don’t have corners!), there are some toys that are played with every single day. These toys are not chosen by me out of any philosophy or value on my part. They are just the toys that, through empirical testing, have emerged as the primo toys for 2-5 year olds at our house.

Here, for your enjoyment, is a short list of toys no yurt should be without:

Play Silks

I bought a set of seven silks for Sophie when she turned two and they have been in DAILY use ever since. They are the perfect toy. Costumes, baby carriers, doll blankets, capes, hammocks, forts, curtains, ocean waters, they can be everything. Ours are getting rather ragged and faded, actually. Maybe it is the lovely appealing colors and the soft texture combined with the versatility of simple squares of floaty fabric, but whatever it is, play silks are pure toy magic.

Stacking Cups

Okay, these don’t look like much, and I would never have thought they were all that, but, dang if these cups haven’t been used every day for something. Not stacking. Stacking was only fun for five minutes or so. But as brightly colored cups, some with holes and some without, that fit into each other…cups for tea parties, bathtubs for mini-dinos, Mommy I made you some coffee, tub toys, sand toys, musical instruments. Just the morning Sophie filled one with raisins and said it was a bird feeder–Luc was the bird. In fact, he had a play silk for wings. We’ve lost the big purple cup but the rest have hung on, miraculously, for years.

Wooden Blocks

Paul adores blocks. I think it is a fetish item for him. As a result, any building toy at a yard sale gets snapped up. We’ve got legos, big wooden blocks (like the picture), little wooden blocks, colored foam blocks, tiny painted wooden blocks, circle things that click together, I could go on and on. Of all of these, the basic wooden blocks get the most play around here. There is always some castle or house or dino barn or road or bridge in the works over by the block tub. The legos are a close second, but they go through phases with those. The wooden blocks, though, those are every day.

Art Supplies

Crayons, colored pencils, pastels, water color paint, poster paint, construction paper, glitter glue, scissors, mountains of tape, play doh, fancy hole punches, stickers, chalk. Every day an array of pictures, sculptures, crafts, cards, collages, and projects flows out of them. It’s awesome. They have no hesitation, no fear about quality, no negative voices in their heads telling them to do something ‘more important.’ Art supplies for kids are so cheap, I try to keep huge amounts on-hand so that there is no fear of running out, and no premium on anything. If Sophie wants to use half a roll of tape on a pair of binoculars, cool. A roll of tape is a buck. Go for it, kiddo. Yesterday they had a ball, Sophie cutting up a dozen pieces of construction paper into different shapes and Luc gluing them down into funny pictures. Oh, the mess,you have no idea. And, by the end, one of the wooden blocks from the nearby tub was glued to the floor. You haven’t lived till you’ve glued a wooden block to the floor. (Don’t worry, I knocked it off with a hammer. No harm done.)

The Sandbox

Here is one of our sandboxes. The other is the sand pile for building purposes (mixing into concrete mortar mix) and right now it is full of dinosaurs, barns, farm animals, shovels, bull dozers, dump-trucks, etc. Sand is endlessly entertaining. They love to play in the sand pile while Paul works nearby. It becomes anything, which seems to be the center characteristic of the Daily Play Toys.

Little People

Here is two year old Sophie putting little people to bed. In a recent post I wrote about the endless configurations of animals and dinosaurs I find set up around here. Figurines, plastic animals, Barbies, dinosaurs–every day these small people get used to enact endless dramas. We probably have hundreds of different small creatures and people. They probably have parties at night when we are all asleep. Hey, why don’t I get invited to those?

There are a few other items in daily use such as the computer, the pillows off the sofa, the dress-up clothes, the television, and the woods. But this, surprisingly short list, pretty much covers 70% of the stuff they play with each day. I wonder when they will grow out of those stacking cups? Looking at my own drawer of sarongs and scarves, I wonder if play silks ever go out of style?

The items that have floated to the top of the toy tide and stayed there for years, seem to be the items with the most flexibility to enter into the game at hand, rather than dictating the game by the toy’s own parameters.

But the short-term toys are great, too. Toys with a few uses, puzzles good for a couple of gos—lots of toys are the item of the week and then pass into the ‘been there, done that’ category. And that’s cool. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, daily use toys, versus single use (or a a few weeks) toys. And with used toys so cheap, having a constant flow, in and out, of destructible toys is great.

Luc was totally into the batmobile last week, this massive hunk of molded black plastic with pop-up guns and turrets and I don’t even know what. He was shooting bad guys for days, having a blast. And now it’s off under the bed somewhere. It was a great batmobile week! I wouldn’t have missed it. And now, he’s building blocks for a plastic mouse and a stuffed lizard, who, it looks like, are eating out of a stacking cup.

Batmobile for a while, and then back to the basics.

Tags: toys

Category: kiddo life