Our 2 year old happens to love being outside and is very safe with heavy and sharp things, loves tools, etc. He loves his little kitchen set, too, at home.
I need to start adding more indoor toys to the box, anyone have anything that was a great find?
My kids enjoyed imaginext, playmobil, legos, wooden train set, wooden building blocks, small wooden kitchen set with some of the Melissa and doug food items, barbies, and GI Joes.
For under four…please get Duplo blocks and not Legos. Duplo blocks are the larger LEGO blocks made for younger children. Regular Legos are way too small for a child of four years of age.
In terms of playdoh…make your own. It’s easy and fun. Add cookie cutters to the kitchen cabinet I mentioned above.
Nesting cups are fun too. Kids can stack them and nest them.
There is a little tube you can purchase that checks for safety for small kids…if something fits through it, it’s not considered safe for little ones as they can choke. Well worth getting!
Our kids loved musical instruments. Some company makes a drum thing…and a few other things fit inside it…maracas, triangle, small cymbals. Kids love them.
A car play mat and hot wheels.
A special doll that’s only at your house. (I inherited that doll!)
Balls – soft of course,. nerf type…basketball, baseball, football.
Fisher Price many years ago had some great stuff–a pirate ship, the farm house, bunch of others. I haven’t seen those around lately but they are worth looking up.
No grands yet but I plan on having some toys/books that are only at Mimi’s/Grammy’s. I remember the coloring books (kind of lame but I still loved them) that my grandmother kept for us. My kids remember the wooden wagon, Little Tike’s car, chunky Playmobil toddler farm, and special books that were only available at my mom’s. As they got older, there were more Playmobil sets and my mom made an amazing play table out of an old door that she painted with roads, stores etc for her Hotwheels obsessed grandsons. Mostly she spent time with them. They still talk about the “giant cookies” they would make together. All they did was roll out premade cookie dough and she let them use a ridiculous amount of sprinkles. Or they would make ice cream sundaes. It would be so much easier now with streaming services, but she actually had Raffi and other kids’ music on cassette to play and sing along. Everything became an instrument! Lots of books and reading out loud. She was a fantastic grandmother.
I had a Fisher Price fire station toy with cars and engines and little firemen. Every kid who came to my house for YEARS played with it.
I also had a play cash register that got a workout. And a real coin sorter. Kinds needed supervision because it sorted real coins, but they loved taking the money out and putting it in the slot and watching it sort the nickels and dimes and pennies.
Our 18 month old GS visited recently and loved playing with the small soft balls inside and the slightly larger soft rubber ball outside. He also loved the mega blocks we had, and books tha were new to him.
Also important but sometimes overlooked… basic childproofing. That doesn’t mean go crazy by padding the corners of every object and buying expensive “babyproof” equipment, it just means a little common sense.
Move breakable things so they're out of easy reach.
Remove poisonous or harmful things.
It’s so easy to get out of practice with this when our kids are grown, but I remember as a mom of young kids that it was a nightmare to visit certain people because the stress from constantly worrying and monitoring the breakables and hazards was tough. If you want to make it a welcoming experience that they’ll be comfy in, keep the stress levels low.
Of all the toys our son enjoyed when he was a toddler, Thomas the Tank Engine outranked them all. My dad made a play table for his set and he played with that thing for hours every day until he was about six or seven. I think designing track configurations was instrumental in sharpening his problem-solving skills and developing his interest in how things work. The table and all the train pieces are the only things he has asked us to save for his kids. When we moved to our new house several years ago, he asked where the set was stored and went to check on it.
Simple and durable are the best characteristics for toys at that age. And, as @scout59 says, patience. A lot of patience.
