Homemade is best

The end of the day usually finds our living room covered with a layer of toys - colorful wooden blocks and pink plastic mega bloks interspersed with piles of books, random stuffed animals, finger puppets - you get the idea. In those moments as I try to clean up, I tend to think the girl's got a lot of toys, but then when I visit other people's homes and see many more toys I begin to wonder...however, I was comforted on more than one occasion this week when I noticed her discovering her own little "toys" around the house. The other day while I was unpacking groceries and making lunch Cassidy found an empty ziploc in the bottom of the grocery bag and set upon her own project...

She managed to pull down the majority of the magnetic alphabet by the end of it. I was pleased to see her so engaged in something that took absolutely no prompting on my part - this wasn't anything we'd done together before, and she didn't seem to want or need any help.

That said, I did pull out a modicum of my own creativity this week too to come up with this homemade gem:

 

I got the inspiration from a baby book and scrounged around the kitchen for some appropriate materials. Basically a big yoghurt container with a slit in the top and a bunch of jar lids that can be dropped through the slit. It was fun watching her figure out what to do with it, and once she finally figured out how to drop the lids through the hole, you could tell she was quite pleased with her little accomplishment.

Watching her enjoy these little homemade entertainments around the house, I feel pretty good about her toy collection after all...