As a new child enters your world, your apartment or house can become a bit disorganized. After kids come along, the disorderliness can worsen into clutter and a total mess. This was definitely the case for me after we had a baby. All of a sudden, my house was like a toy store with baby toys and things all over the place. I could not keep up with working and raising a child. I was happy if just half of the apartment was cluttered with baby toys. Parents expend a lot of energy thinking about which toys their child should have and which toys are useless. Most parents think their child should have educational baby toys to embark on life with. I was one of them. However I don’t think its a good idea to rule out the plain old toys for fun. She definitely learned her colors and alphabet way before any of the other children but I also thought that she needed to understand how to be a child too.
Baby toys are available in so many places, K-Mart, Toy-R-Us, the supermarket and of course specialty shops just for babies. You can buy them new at stores or you can look around for yard sales. It depends on the amount of money you want to spend. I was not able to afford to buy the brand new expensive baby toys. When my wife was pregnant, she ordered several baby toys knowing that we would not have as much time to spend shopping once the baby arrived. We also discovered lots of my daughter’s baby toys at neighborhood yard sales as well as inherited toys from cousins who had outgrown them. Many of those toys that we managed to find were not all that educational since we usually picked the ones that were colorful or ones that we remembered from our own childhood.
When looking for baby toys or toys for any young child, you have should choose to buy educational or fun toys. Some toys have to invigorate them mentally and help them raise their intellectual abilities while others should really just be about playing. Now that my daughter is a toddler, she no longer needs baby toys that teach the simple basics. I do owe some of her mental alertness and early learning skills to her baby toys. However, now that she takes an interest in older toys she still learns things. For example, her kitchen set has food and plates and other such items. She’s loves to play pretend now and in doing so she now understands the concept of table setting and which foods go with which foods.
While I do attribute a lot of her baby toys for giving her an incredible head start, a lot has to do with what you permit your baby to do. It’s really as simple as allowing them to look around and generate a creative imagination. They will thank you for it someday.
Tags: Baby Toys, Educational Toys, infant toys