Drums, dog chews, colanders, and other miscellaneous "toys"

One of the things that becomes readily apparent to new parents is that what we designate as toys for our children doesn't mean anything to them. Or if you're a new parent and haven't discovered this yet, wait until your child starts crawling...

It really doesn't take much to entertain a young child, does it? Sure, there are plenty of elaborate toys out there that we buy and sink hard earned money into, but unfortunately there's no guarantee our kids will play with said toys. In fact, now that I think about it, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the two: the more money you spend, the less interest your child will have in playing with it.

Generally speaking, it seems that if an object meets at least one of the following criteria, it stands an excellent shot of becoming your child's next favorite toy: 1) it has buttons, 2) it makes an exceedingly irritating or loud noise (often one in the same), 3) it's at someone else's house, or 4) it's a no-no . Jack discovered the drum set recently at a friend's house and boy was he in heaven. It was fun to watch him play around for a while, but I was very glad after about 5 minutes that the drum set was NOT at our house, though my father (a former percussionist) has threatened to buy us one.

At least around our house, Haley's dog chews (see #4) are also an instant play (and chew) toy for Jack. Recently my stash of colanders and cutting boards have also become interesting to him. I'm not quite sure why, since they don't really fall into the above categories, but since they're pretty harmless, I've just given in and let him pull them out of the kitchen cabinets while I cook.

One final observation on toys is that the age recommendations are often useless (aside from the risk from small parts to kids under 3). I recently bought Jack a kitchen to play with and he loves it (minus the small parts of course), even though the age on the box says 3 years and older. He's also shown a renewed interest in some of the things he played with as a baby, like keys, mirrors, etc.

How about you, what do your kids like to play with?