I can make lists of toys I’m considering for the kids this year, and I likely WILL make such lists. But I also like to see lists of toys someone else has actually opened and played with, so that’s the theme of today’s grouping. This is mostly toys I’ve RECENTLY been surprised by and pleased with, but I’m also putting in a couple that our family has found enduringly fun to play with, and also one that I recommend you buy not for an actual child but for a grown up who likes miniatures/dollhouses (or MAYBE for a VERY CAREFUL child of the quiet and meticulous sort).

Melissa & Doug Magnetic Hide and Seek Board (photo from Amazon.com). A couple of times a year, my mom and aunt go shopping to stock their gift shelves and the toy rooms they’re responsible for freshening. This is one of the toys that most impressed everyone when we opened it up to try it out. They’d already realized that each door opened to reveal something inside (cookie inside the cookie jar, car inside the garage, etc.), but we hadn’t realized the item inside would be a removable piece. And in typical Melissa & Doug “impress ‘em by going one better than they even knew they wanted” form, the pieces are magnetic so they don’t scatter everywhere if you tip the puzzle.

Caring Corners Nanny Oakes Interactive Nursery (photo from Amazon.com). This is another of their finds, and I think what most impressed me about it was how little I thought I’d like it, compared with how much I did like it.
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Oh, man. William has been invited to a birthday party this weekend. Furthermore, he got the invitation yesterday, which means there is not much time to think. And William is the sort of child who, if you ask him what his BEST FRIEND SINCE FIRST GRADE’s favorite color is, will say “……Humm. Maybe….blue?” And if you say, “Well, what does she like to do? Does she have any hobbies?,” will say “…..Humm. Uh….” So on the topic of this weekend’s birthday child, a classmate he has known only since school started this year, I feel very lucky that he happened to know whether the child was a boy or a girl.

And eleven is a tricky age to buy for. I don’t even know what to get my OWN children in that age range. Well, there is nothing for it but to dig up some candidates, which is something I had to do before Christmas anyway.

Crafting With Cat Hair (photo from Amazon.com). I realize this is odd. I realize this is the sort of item that may need some further explanation, or perhaps would have been better suited to the unusual miscellany list from last week.
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This week a little virus sped through our household: sore throats and 103-degree fevers for everyone except me. If I ever wondered if I might have been a good and kind and angelic nurse in, say, an army tent with rows of patients, the answer is “Probably not.” Six people asking for more juice, more water, a blanket, the remote, maybe another piece of toast, was pretty much all I could handle pleasantly, and probably the adverb “pleasantly” is pushing it a bit, even in much nicer conditions and with much less upsetting illness/injuries than would be in an army tent.

There are certain things I keep in the house always, so I have them on hand when illness visits us and don’t have to add “running to the store” to my toast-fetching list:
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This was Elizabeth’s most successful tonsillectomy-recovery present:

Ravensburger Hello Kitty Hatbox Tin puzzle (photo from Amazon.com). She saw it when we were looking for something else, and she instantly wanted it. I balked at the price: why was it $14, when there are 100-piece Hello Kitty puzzles at Target for $3.99? I assumed the difference was in the tin (instead of a cheap cardboard box), and I didn’t want to spend so much money when I didn’t even know that she would LIKE to put together a puzzle.

So her loving aunt and uncle bought it for her, and I bought her a $4 one. And OH I SEE. No, it’s not the just the tin, it’s that the puzzle inside the tin is WAY better quality than the $4 one. Much larger overall size, and the pieces are thicker, glossier, sturdier, and fit together better. Furthermore, Elizabeth must have put it together twenty times that first week, and keeps bringing it out now to put it together again. And to my surprise, _I_ like doing the puzzle WITH her: it’s one of the few parent-child play activities I’ve found where I’m not suffering. When it started getting too easy for me, I did new things: only doing the pieces with no picture on them; only doing the trickiest parts and not peeking at the box while working on them; working on the puzzle while the picture was upside-down (as in, I saw the kitty face upside down, not as in the puzzle was face-down on the table); etc.

Where was I? Oh, yes: the surprising success of the puzzle. So now I’m looking for more puzzles in tins (100-piece is pretty much exactly her ability level), and wondering if “being in a tin” consistently means good things about the quality of the puzzle inside, or if it’s kind of hit-and-miss. At the very least, a tin means not having to try to figure out how to slice one of those cardboard ones open without destroying the box.

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I’ve been considering a tattoo. At this point, I don’t know if I’ll actually get one, or if I’ll get one and then get lots more, or if I’ll decide I don’t want one after all, or if it will be something I’ll dither about for the rest of my life.

For now, I am having fun experimenting with temporary tattoos. It’s a good way to experiment with size and placement and whether I actually LIKE art on my skin, and it’s been fun to go to the pool and have all the other parents wondering if I actually have a big unicorn on my upper arm. I’m totally lying: I have not gone to the pool with a temporary tattoo. It’s because I’m worried people will either (1) think it’s real or (2) know it isn’t, but think I think they think it is.

But! We’ve been having fun with them at home. The ones I bought the most of are only $1.50 a book (they’re small books—those little Dover ones that are about the size of a notecard), and contain about the same square inchage of tattooage whether there are 4 largeish ones or 20 small ones. Amazon has them on their “4-for-3″ deal, so if you buy four books, one of them will automatically be free. If you buy eight books, two will be free. And so on. (Make sure you check each listing to make sure that one has the “4-for-3″ deal mentioned under Special Offers. All the ones I got did—but there are other sellers selling things on Amazon, and of course theirs don’t qualify.) All photos below are from Amazon.

Henna tattoos. This combines the tattoo fascination I’ve never acted on with the henna fascination I’ve never acted on. I also got the Henna Paisley and the Henna Floral ones.
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William, Robert, and Elizabeth have all been invited to a birthday party this weekend, so I need to come up with three presents for a 10-year-old girl. I could use a hand, if you have a minute—and then we’ll have this later as a reference for the next time we need it!

She likes cats, and she likes anything cute or fuzzy. She likes Phineas & Ferb, and SpongeBob Squarepants. She likes crafts. She plays soccer. She’s William’s age and grade and is mostly William’s friend, but she plays with everyone when she’s here.

Normally I aim for about $10 for a party gift (in this case, from each of the three children), but I’d be willing to go a little higher.

First candidate: Aurora Plush Fluffee Fluffy Tails (photo from Amazon.com), about $9.00. Most households already have more stuffed animals than they can handle—and yet, the sight of this cat reduced our household to “OHHHHhhhhhhhhhh!!!”s of cuteness.
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One reason I love “saved items” area of online shopping carts is that it takes me a long time to decide to spring for something. Well, or else it doesn’t, like when someone mentions something and I have it on its way within 2 minutes. But MOSTLY I have to think for awhile. Here are the things I’m currently thinking about:

I am on a bit of a break with Postcrossing, but I suspect I’ll be going back to it. I already have way more postcards than I can possibly send—but Pantone color-chip postcards (photo from Amazon.com) are making me very tempted.

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My 6-year-old daughter will soon be having a tonsillectomy. Even though this is a totally routine outpatient procedure, I am fretting. And one way I deal with anxiety is by preparing—or perhaps more accurately, over-preparing. I’d like to buy her a number of fun things to entertain her during the two weeks the doctor suggests we plan for her to be in a nest on the couch, and I’ve been distracting myself with the decisions.

Our Target has some of the Littlest Pet Shop Petriplets sets on clearance, so I bought Elizabeth the kitties one (photo from Amazon.com) which has three cats and a little triple cat-perch, and the bunnies one which has three bunnies and a little triple carrier. These don’t seem to me to have high play-value, but they’re cute and she likes cute, and they can be played with from a couch nest.

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(Also see last year’s summer fun post for more ideas.)

We don’t go on many special summer outings (this year, with the youngest turning four, I am just starting to wonder if I might be able to handle taking all five of them somewhere fun on my own), so every year I like to buy a few fun things to make an at-home summer vacation more fun.

Last summer I bought the Wubbzy soundtrack (photo from Amazon.com) and we listened to it on our way to and from swimming lessons each day; it became the soundtrack of our summer.

For this summer, I bought the Phineas and Ferb soundtrack (photo from Amazon.com). I’d been watching it go up and down in the $8-10 range since before Christmas, and this week it went down to $7.73 with a free $1 MP3 download and I sprang. (I might get the Summer Belongs to You MP3 album, too.)
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The twins turned six last week and WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH MY TINY NEWBORN TWINS ARE SIX!! it was a fun party.

At our house, 6 is the age for allowances, so the biggest hit was probably the piggy banks with the first allowance inside.

Decorative Piggy Bank (photo from Target.com). We got $10 ones from Target. I brought the twins over to the display of banks (there were a ton: metallic solid colors, white ones with flowers or polka dots, pigs dressed up in various costumes) and asked them all casual-like what their favorite pigs were, then went back and bought them later.
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