My Daughter’s Favorite Toys are Not Toys At All
My daughter has a whole box full of toys. Admittedly, I filtered through most of them and put several superfulous toys in a bag in the closet, but she still has plenty of fun ones to play with. Yet, the stackers, blocks, pull toys, nest toys, toys with wheels, and toys that look like telephones and computers all lie dormant in their place. Instead, here is a list of my daughter’s favorite toys:
1. Post-it notes: Who knows how she first came in contact with this ingenious office invention of the twentieth century, but ever since, she can’t pass them without wanting to peel them apart, stick them on furniture and sort them into piles.
2. Pens: She knows where they are; every place in the house where pens were once organized are now empty. She doesn’t use the pens or sharpies or highlighters, she just carries them around and sometimes puts them inside of things for me to find them later. This fixation will necessarily come to an end when she figures out how to take the caps off.
3. Empty boxes: Not just the big ones that she can get inside of, but the empty tissue box, the mailing box, the cereal box, etc. She likes to open them up or put things inside of them. We have a whole cabinet in our kitchen filled with trash that she likes to play with.
4. Sunglasses: She refers to them as, “glass.” It’s obvious why these are fun. She opens and closes them, puts them on her head and around her neck. She broke a couple of pairs, so we eventually bought her her own cheap pair to play with and break at will.
5. Mud, Rocks, Sticks: By far, her favorite. A country girl after my own heart. I bought her a toddler sized wheelbarrow, a shovel, a trowel and spade all her own (I could not resist; they were just so cute.), but she barely notices them as she shuffles by to stomp in puddles and climb boulders. She’s a great climber.
I could go on, but you get the point. The other day, someone on Craig’s List asked me to donate a toy I was selling to her because she was too poor to buy her kids any. Really, you don’t need to buy kids toys at all. Yeah, we want to get them the newest educational ones that will help their development, the puzzles and shapes that fit into holes, but they will develop on their own without them, figuring out how to fit the stick in the gopher hole or the pen in the box. In fact, my daughter no longer wants to read her books, instead she would rather flip through old family photo albums and let me narrate what we were doing. This is my new favorite toy.
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