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Our all-time favorite household baby toys

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Angela

If you have, or had, a baby already, you know that they would grab just whatever is in their reach and play with it. Babies investigate any object they can find, especially those they are not supposed to find 🙂 This natural tendency of babies to explore and discover stuff can be tricky, but you can also take advantage of it. Let me show you how!

Babies do not yet categorize objects into toys and non-toys. For them all is new and worth to be discovered. This implies that you can turn just about anything into a toy for your baby, as long as it is safe and you’re OK with whatever damage your baby might do to the “baby toy”. The list of household items that you can turn into baby toys is practically endless, but let me share with you my top 10 of great household baby toys. These have entertained all three of my mini-explorers when they were between 6-18m of age.

Straws: Great for babies of 6 to 9 months. They are perfectly sized for baby hands and they bend, fold, make funny noise … What more do you need to entertain your baby for hours? At a later stage they can experiment blowing and sucking, if possible in combination with a glass of water to increase the fun!
Spoons: Wow I get to make noisy while banging the spoon on the table 🙂 Also great to chew on or, in case of a metal spoon, to use it as a mirror. You can give different type of spoons (metal, plastic, wood …) to have your baby discover different textures.
Cups: As of 9 months and above they will exercise stacking the cups, unstacking them and throwing them all over the place 🙂 Preferably use hard plastic or hard-cardboard cups (no glass). You can use also softer plastic cups, but your baby will destroy them rather than play with them.
Food containers: Works pretty much the same as the plastic cups, especially if they are different sizes. But older babies will also have fun putting the lid and taking it off again.
Ice cubes: Might get a little messy, but babies love the sensation of cold slippery ice. If you want to go wild, you can try adding some food color to the water before making the ice cubes to increase the fun.
A tissue box: Give a tissue box to your baby and soon you’ll find tissues all over the room, they just love it and can’t stop 🙂 If you’re not ready for that messy, then use rather an empty tissue box, which you can fill with random things for your baby to discover. They adore putting their hand through the opening of the box and feeling what’s inside.
Cardboard boxes: The possibilities with cardboard boxes are endless. Tired of your baby crawling around where he shouldn’t go? Put him in a cardboard box with a selection of toys and you’re sure he will stay put for a while.
Old newspaper and magazines: Before you throw away an old newspaper or magazine, try giving it to your baby. Isn’t it great fun to tear the pages out and have them fly through the room? Maybe hard to imagine as an adult, but babies love it. Just be aware that your baby might want to put the paper in his/her mouth, so for this you better stay close.
Colander: Comparable to food containers, but then bigger and with some holes in it. To increase the fun you can stick some things (eg. pipe cleaners) through the holes, or have your baby do so.
Tablet: A more tricky one, I advise you stay around and put the tablet on the floor to avoid accidents. Open up an album with family pictures and have your baby swipe between the pictures of familiar faces. Can be helpful if you want to teach your kid the names of your family members for example.

I’m sure there are plenty of other (safe) objects around the house that you can use as baby toys. What (non) toy is your baby enjoying most ?

If you liked this post, you might also like:

3 Great Baby Activities

Our Top 20 Baby Toys

Easy DIY Baby Toys

Posted in Parenting, Toys-apps-games | Tagged babies, baby, baby toys, Parenting tips | Comments Off

Easy DIY toys for a mini-explorer baby!

Posted on July 29, 2013 by Angela

Sure, a good selection of “real toys” can offer great educational stimuli to kids (I own an online toy shop would you have expected otherwise?) and on top they don’t require preparation besides buying them. However, there is also a whole world of discovery that you can open up for your baby with simple household supplies! And believe me, it can be a lot of fun and very rewarding to see your kids play with your self-made toy!

Below I’ll share 6 ideas to make your own easy toys for babies. If DIY is not your thing, check out our posts on our favorite toys for babies and three baby play activities that we particularly enjoyed. If DIY is your thing or you want to give it a try, read on!

The next couple of ideas require a little more than picking up a household item, but are super easy to make or get and of course great fun for your babies, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about them 🙂

Sensory boxes
This is where we actually get to mix real toys and household-toys for babies who can sit by themselves.

Put your baby in a big (shallow) cardboard box and fill up the rest of the box with all kind of baby-safe-stuff in different colors and textures. You’ll see that your baby will start investigating the ‘toys’ one by one before tossing them away. But likely they will stay in the box, so your baby is set for en endless discovery tour.
I would typically mix spoons, straws, … with teddy bears, clothes, actual toys and other baby-safe-stuff.

High contrast patterns
These are great for babies of 0-4 months, and the nice thing is that there are many resources out there to make or print your own. I wrote earlier about high contrast ideas for babies and newborns, so check it out! And besides this, there are of course lots of nice educational toys that you can buy.

Bottle Rattles
A classic, I know, but still a great household-toy, so it deserves its place on this list.
Take a plastic bottle and fill it with a little bit of rice, stones or another substance. I would usually take a half a liter bottle and flatten it a little so it is easier to grab for small baby hands. You now have a free rattle toy for your baby. And if rattling is not the thing you’re looking for, fill it with water and let your baby experience with it.

Big cardboard boxes and other special house equipment
If you happen to get your hands on a really big cardboard box like the ones from a washing machine, fridge or some other big object that comes wrapped, DON’T throw it away! This can be transformed in a fabulous self-made exploration toy for babies of +9m. I made a cardboard house with Victoria (4) and baby Elena (11m) just had to inspect it all the time!

If you don’t have big cardboard boxes, no problem, you can always get creative with the drying rack or other pieces of furniture (chairs, tables…).

Balloons
That bigger kids love balloons is no secret, but have your tried them on your baby? I introduced balloons to my kids at the age of 3 months. I’d put my baby with a balloon in her playpen and she’d start frantically moving her arms and legs (as only babies can do ) which would make the balloon jump and move all around her playpen. Great fun and laughter!

Later on, around 6 months or so, she’d start grabbing the balloon, feeling and tasting the texture, but also squeezing it and enjoying the sound it makes. I felt that it also stimulated her moving (turning, sliding and crawling) when she tried going after the balloon.

Soap bubbles
Blow some soap bubbles close to your baby’s face and see how she follows them attentively with her eyes and tries to grab them with her hands. And occasionally a bubble splashing on their face or hands will lead to pure pleasure and a rich sensory experience. We unfortunately only discovered this once our oldest was a pre-schooler already. Having her play outside blowing soap bubbles we noticed her baby brother was fascinated by them.

There are plenty of more ideas I could talk about, but I’m already happy you got the courage to read so far :-). I hope you enjoyed the read and found some ideas you’d like to try out.

If you liked what you read so far and are up to read some more, I recommend you also check out these posts:

Our all-time favorite household baby toys
Baby Play Space from The Imagination Tree
Infant Activities from Stay at home mom
Sensory Bags from Growing a Jeweled Rose

Posted in Craft and creativity, Toys-apps-games | Tagged babies, baby, baby toys, Creative play, Parenting tips, positive parenting tips | 1 Comment

Baby playtime – 3 Activity tips to play with a small baby

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Angela

Our third mini-explorer is not a baby any more, she’s turning into a toddler. So before I forget all about how it is to have a baby in the house I’d like to dedicate some posts on this blog to babies and baby activities.

Play ideas, our favorite baby toys, tips and tricks for handling babies and other stuff we discovered along the way but would have loved to know upfront. I’ll write about all that in the upcoming weeks.

For today I’ll stick to writing about three random play activities that I particularly love(d).

(1) Mingle baby mingle!
One of the things babies loved the most is to be part of the fun. Although they obviously cannot do much, they are very interested in what is going on around them. If you have older kids it can be even more fun. My kids were very enthusiastic to get their little sister involved in what they do. Below you can see Lukas (then 2,5 years) reading a book together with Elena (then 4 months).

(2) Window or mirror watching!
Window watching? Isn’t that boring? Sure it is, but not so for your baby! I found it almost worked therapeutically on my babies.

When they were in a difficult mood, I’d often take them to the window facing a busy street. We’d look together at the stuff happening on the street, point her things, describe them, give them a name, … and feel like I’m having a great conversation time with my little one!

And if you don’t have a good window, try putting the baby in front of a mirror and see what happens :-). Below Victoria (8 months at the time) is talking to herself in the mirror.

(3) Let’s talk … and talk some more
Now that we’re anyway on the subject of having a great conversation with your baby, why not try to make it an interactive talk? You can do this in different ways:

You have likely heard the advice to imitate your baby and let your baby imitate you. Repeating the sound your baby makes allows her to hear it back and stimulates her to try it again. And like this, at around 3 months you can have a rich conversation with your baby 😉
Babies also like patterns and predictable actions, and you can delight your baby of 6 months or more with that. The idea is to do something to your baby only after she also did something. For example, I would blow on Elena’s face or tickle her only after she has repeated a sound, or action. This way, your baby takes the lead in telling you when she’d like to be entertained and how.

For now, I hope I got you motivated to do some conversation training with your baby 🙂

Next I will write more about our ideas of turning household supplies in the best discovery toys for a mini-explorer baby!

Posted in Parenting, Toys-apps-games | Tagged activities for children, babies, baby, baby toys, Creative play, favorite toy, Parenting tips, positive parenting tips | 2 Comments

Princess Birthday Party Ideas from Victoria’s 5th Birthday.

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Angela

Victoria’s 5th birthday was coming soon and the closer we got, the more she’d talk to us about it. So we started planning. First we made some home made birthday cards to invite her friends to the birthday party. Then we started thinking of how to entertain 10 kids in our living room and still survive the event.

Last year when we celebrated Victoria’s 4th birthday we baked cookies with the kids and did a crafts activity with Fisher TiP. This year we wanted to try again a crafts activity, but we wanted to take a more organised approach to it. So we thought to do everything around a theme which ended up to be princesses and castles.

We did 3 activities with kids for Victoria’s 5th birthday party:

(1) A craft activity, to keep the kids busy and have a result that they could take home. We prepared a crafts box in advance, so we just had to take it out and we worked all together on the saloon table. And the result was that each of them could take home a self made princess and a castle.

If you’re interested to do this also, this is how we did the paper craft princesses and the cardboard castles.

(2) An easy to do birthday cake. We bought 2 Herta cakes, which we decorated with some candles and a playmobil princess.

The cake was a great success, most of all as it got served with some fruits and cream, all in the shape of a princess ( yes yes…it is a princess you just need a bit of imagination, which luckily kids have 😛 )

(3) Some active time for the kids to burn out all that energy they got from the cake. For this we made a game, BUT we did not get to play it (maybe we’ll play it for another birthday party). Since the weather was super nice that day, we went to the nearby park where the kids played in the sand and ran around till the parents picked them up together with their castle, princess and home made bag of candies.

What do you do for your kids birthday? Do share by either leaving a comment on our website, or on our facebook page.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, birthday party, craft ideas, crafts for kids, princess | 3 Comments

Easy crafts with kids: How to make a castle

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Angela

For Victoria’s princess birthday, we made a whole collection of princesses from paper. But princesses live in castles, so I decided (in my enthusiasm for the event) to also make a series of castles from cardboard and paper. As I had to do this craft activity with 10 small kids, I had to keep it simple so I limited myself to a castle with four walls from cardboard and a tower in the corner.

I wanted the kids to take their creation home so I choose to do 10 simple castles. My drawing skills are not that great so I used the internet and the tools in the house for support (a printer, some scissors, glue and cardboard):

I borrowed some images from here, printed them 4 by 4 on A3 papers and the kids did the cutting.
I cut rectangles with the same dimension as the above printed walls, out of some pizza boxes.
For the towers I used toilet paper rolls and red colored paper for the roof.
The kids glued the parts together, cutting the gate out and assembling the four walls.

To assemble the walls, you need to make 2 cuts in each piece: for 2 of them you cut halfway from the bottom, and for the other two you cut halfway from the top.

I also made two cuts in the towers to be able to slide them in the corner of the castle wall which also gave stability to the whole construction.

This activity takes a bit of preparation in the sense that you need to print the images, but for the rest it’s really simple to do.

We made this activity with 10 kids ranging from 5 to 3,5 year old and it all went super smooth, but I had to be constantly involved in this craft activity with kids.

If you have just 1 or 2 kids, you can make a castle with more different corners, windows, towers, … and you can have some time off while the kids are busy with the cutting and the gluing.

So if you make a princess, prince or a knight … I suggest you make a castle as well and your kid will have great fun playing with both.

If you’re looking for a bigger castle to make, you can see our previous posts where we turned cardboard boxes into castles!

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Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged castle crafts, craft ideas, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard, crafts with toilet paper rolls, crafts with toilet rolls, ideas for craft activity with kids, kids crafts | 3 Comments

Easy DIY paper crafts princess

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Angela

After the big success with the fairy wings, I thought it would be great for Victoria’s birthday to do some more girly stuff, so we decided to make her a princess birthday party. The ideal occasion to make our own princess. And not just one. We organised a complete paper crafts session and created an army of paper princesses!

It’s an easy paper crafts activity and most of the materials you need are standard stuff you might already have in the house.

A cardboard roll forms the body of the princess and some crepe paper serves as the dress (could also be a napkin or so).
The head and crown are made of colored paper and they are connected to the body by a toothpick.
Last but not least, some pipe cleaners to make the arms of our princess.

As I did this activity with 10 5-year olds, I decided to prepare a couple of things in advance. But if I’m to do this again just with one or two kids, I’d do the whole process together with them as it is an easy activity for kids of 4-5 years and above.

For the base I cut about 6-7cm from a cardboard roll. I taped a cardboard cover, with a whole in the middle, on top as this would serve later on to stick the toothpick in.

Next step was to cut the different parts for the face, hair and crown from paper and the dress from the crepe paper. You don’t need any special tools to get nice shapes, I used a plate and glass for the circles and free drawing for the rest.

All that was left now was for the kids to glue the parts together, draw the face of the princess and connect the arms.

As an extra touch, I tied a ribbon around the “chest” to give the princess more flair. And as any true princess, she also needs some accessories, so I gave her a paper umbrella that she could hold in her hands 🙂

I was actually surprised myself of how nice the princess looks, given that after all it’s a fairly simple and easy crafts activity for kids (and parents). I hope it gives you some inspiration!

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged activities for children, craft ideas, crafts for kids, Creative play, girls crafts, paper crafts, princess, princess birthday party | 2 Comments

Make bedtime a fun game for your kids

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Angela

How we tweaked our 30-count technique to make bedtime routine a fun game

Is bedtime also so tough for you? Until recently bedtime for us was a fairly easy time, we had our method figured out and it worked well. But recently it doesn’t always work anymore. On some evenings, we need the best of our convincing skills to get them to move up, or just drag them to their room. But not anymore. Our new bedtime game makes the whole preparing-for-bed a fun time.

Remember our counting to 30 technique to calm down a fight between 2 kids? We turned this around, rather than calming down, we now use the 30-trick to give them a challenge and get them to move. Curious? Read the story of how we get Victoria ready for bed:

Victoria, tired, hangs around on the sofa. Bedtime is close and my proposals to go up hit a wall of laziness. So I tell her “Victoria, come with me, I want to show you something.” Her curiosity raised, she follows me to the bottom of the stairs. I look at her, putting a wondering face, finger to my mouth, and say “I bet that you can not run to your room, take down your trousers and slip, put on your pyjamas trousers and come back to me, all that before I count to 30!”

Her face moves from surprised, to thinking, sparkle in her eyes, smile on her lips and then she shouts “I can do that mommy, look!” Before I even get to two, she’s halfway up the stairs. I patiently count aloud, while I hear various sounds coming from her room. … 13 … 14 … She appears at the top of the stairs. She takes a halt, checks I’m not yet at thirty and then she flies of the stairs … 16 … “Stop mommy” Victoria shouts, “You see, I did it in 16 mommy”. She shines, proud, ready for a new challenge.

And so it went on for 10 minutes or so, until she was fully dressed in pyjamas, went to the toilet, brushed her teeth and washed her hands and face. She would have continued, but it was really time for bed.

Of course, certain things are better not hurried if, let’s say, you don’t want pee all over the bathroom floor 🙂 So we made a deal, when she would get to a phase where I did not want her to hurry, for example brushing her teeth, she would shout “Stop”. I then stopped counting until she shouts “OK”. This way she could take as much time as needed and we still got the challenge going on. And she really went along with it. No cheating or anything!

What I particularly like about the “game” is that it gives them challenges without getting competitive. I sometimes put them a joint challenge. So they do not compete against each other, rather work together to achieve a common goal. Besides not wanting my kids to see everything as a competition, I hope it will give them a sense of teamwork and teach them to work together and take care of each other. We’ll see in 10 years or so how that worked out 🙂

And to conclude a fun bedtime routine, the kids do some dancing before getting in the bedtime. Victoria used to call it ‘Doing difficult sports’ …

High Five !!

Posted in Parenting, Toys-apps-games | Tagged Creative play, kids game, Parenting tips | Comments Off

Impress your family with a magic photo of your kids

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Angela

Chances are high that you take loads of pictures of your kid. I know I do! Many are crap, some are good, but from time to time I manage to make a great picture and then I look at it over and over again.

Usually it is luck who decides whether my pictures are great or just ok. This time I took a bit of a different approach. I had an idea in mind, prepared the scene, did a 10-minute photoshoot and after some manipulations I ended up with this:

I called it Victoria’s magic 🙂

Just to set things straight, I am no professional photographer, neither a photoshop pro. Truth is, this is fairly easy to make. All you need is a digital reflex camera, a tripod, a computer and a dose of creativity.

Here is how you can do this for yourself:

Once you decided on the scene, install your tripod and take a couple of test pictures to see if you get it right. I suggest you shoot in manual mode so you take each of the different pictures with the exact same settings (if you’re a complete beginner like me, take your first shot in automatic and then copy the settings in manual mode). Then take several pictures with your kid in different positions, making sure they do not overlap and the rest of the scene stays untouched.

If you get it right, all you need to do afterwards is cut out the different areas of each picture and put them together. With my first attempt I had to cover up some lighting differences as I forgot to shoot in manual mode, but the second time, I literally did no more than adding cut-out zones of pictures on top of the original.

All in all, it took me about 20 minutes from setting up the tripod to having my boy’s love for trains depicted in a magic picture.

I bet the cut-and-paste work is a real piece of cake in Photoshop or Gimp if you know how to work with those programs. But for the rest of us who don’t, you can even do the pasting work in paint or powerpoint, which is what I did by the way, I bet you didn’t notice 🙂

This is how the pictures looked like at first:

So, are you ready to make your impressive pictures with your kids?

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged baby photos, children photos, Creative play | Comments Off

How to make easy birthday cards for your kids

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Angela

Some weeks ago we celebrated Victoria’s birthday with a kids’ party at our place. A party means guests and thus invitations to make. I thought it would be fun to make our own birthday cards as a crafts activity with the kids, rather than buying a pack in the supermarket. So I collected some colored paper, balloons, washi tape and some more decorative items I found in the house and off we were.

At first Victoria wanted to make cards with princesses, so I cut out a card on which I drew a princess for her to color. Victoria was very happy, but my motivation to draw princesses on 10 birthday cards was quite low. So while she was busy drawing I made an alternative easy version. When I was done and Victoria saw it, she was so excited about it that she “demanded” all cards to be like that and she totally forgot about her princesses. So here is what we did …

It all started from the idea to do a card with a balloon so that the kids would have double fun and they can have some playtime with the balloon. With washi tape I covered the sides as to create a frame and then stuck the balloon in the middle. On the free corner on the top I stuck a flower as decoration and in the opposite corner I drew a 5 with some sparkly glue. I printed out the details of the party on a small piece of paper which I stuck to the back side, with some washi tape again to stay in the same style.

If you wonder where we got the flowers from, we recycled them from a flower necklace which Victoria got on a previous kids’ party.

I don’t know if the kids had fun receiving the cards and playing with the balloons. What I do know is that Victoria was extremely excited to take the cards to school and that it was fun to make our own easy birthday cards.

Update: If you want to see some other easy to make birthday cards, have a look at these fairy themed birthday cards you can also do with the kids.

Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged balloons, craft ideas, crafts for kids, washi tape | 1 Comment

Cardboard fairy wings, a great activity for kids

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Angela

I was doubting whether to propose the kids to make some cardboard fairy wings.

I try to believe that stereotypes are not so much my thing, so when it gets to raising my kids I try to avoid a too “boy – girl” view on things. However this seems to be a fight I’m about to lose. I can stand on my head as much as I want: my son loves everything with wheels and my daughter loves pink, fairies, princesses and playing “house”. So when I asked Victoria to choose our next cardboard crafts activity, the choice for cardboard fairy wings was quickly made.

While I went to collect the cardboard, Victoria and Lukas were eager to start the play. They went ahead and started practicing some fairy-flying through the living room. I choose 2 big pieces of cardboard from some cardboard boxes. Despite the challenges posed by Elena(1,5) dancing on the cardboard, I managed after a while to cut the cardboard fairy wings out. I put paper tape on the places where paint would not stick, and the kids got to choose the colors they wanted to use for their cardboard fairy wings.

And surprise surprise…they chose pink and violet. I also added some glitter to make the wings look even more fairy like.

After painting one side, we put the cardboard fairy wings on the heater for them to dry faster. Though for Victoria that wasn’t going fast enough so she also tried to blow them dry. But after a while she gave up and decided she’ll better wait for her cardboard fairy wings to dry by themselves.

When both sides of the wings were painted and dried, I made some wholes in the back and used some ribbon to connected the cardboard wings to my little fairies.

And gosh I had some happy fairies flying around the house!

Making cardboard fairy wings is very easy and the kids and me had lots of fun playing with them, just that you need to be patient for the paint to dry 🙂

What did we learn from making our cardboard fairy wings:

Patience: we had to wait for each side of the wings to dry before we could go on with our play.
Basic color mixing: red + white= pink and red + blue = violet
Pretend play/ drama play: my two little fairies flew through the house and spread happiness all around 🙂

If your child is into fairies, then this printable fairy will also be fun to make. Also have a look at these easy to make fairy crowns. They fit very well with our cardboard wings don’t you think?

Update: Check on the blog of fun at home with kids how Asia took this cardboard fairy wings idea and gave her own twist to it!

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Posted in Craft and creativity | Tagged Cardboard boxes, crafts for kids, crafts with cardboard, fairy, fairy crafts | 1 Comment