Delilah’s Top 5 Favorite Toys
With Christmas right around the corner, my mind has been on toys for Delilah. I’ve spent weeks planning what kind of toys to get her so she would have some variety in the ways she can play and the different learning opportunities that come from them. Along with that I’ve been trying to balance what I’m getting for her and with questions from family about what they should get her. I’ve actually had to enlist my mom’s help to be the go-to person for questions. A lot of our family and friends wanted suggestions on what to get her but they also want the toy to be a surprise to me as well. I ended up making a list of different toys and books on Amazon to share with my mom. That way she could give ideas to family members and help prevent duplicate gifts, all while keeping everything a secret from me. Which is driving me a little crazy, by the way!
With all focus on toys, I thought it would be fun to share some of Delilah’s favorite toys, even the ones that aren’t intended to be a toy!
Spoons: When I think about toys that make Delilah the happiest, strangely spoons come to mind. She goes absolutely crazy when you offer her a spoon, especially when she’s sitting in her high chair. Since discovering her love of spoons, I started giving her spoons to play with while I’m cooking dinner. We also noticed that she started using her spoons to bang on things, so now we give her a snack container to use as a little drum and she loves it!
Her Baby Doll: Delilah absolutely loves babies! I find it kind of funny how much she loves them considering that she’s only ever met another baby once. Still, she loves them so much that she just lights up with excitement when she sees another baby on TV or in the store. I know she’s a little young for most baby doll toys, but she saw a section of baby dolls toys one day while we were shopping and got so excited. She hasn’t had any kind of reaction in the toy section of the store except for when she noticed the babies. We found a nice plush doll for her without any little parts and she loved it. She carried it throughout the whole store and for days afterward
Mirrors: Delilah is at that age where just looking in a mirror is a hoot and a half. She gets so excited whenever Delilah sees herself in the mirror. She loves to watch herself laughing and clapping. One day we were out shopping and she was sitting in the shopping cart just laughing and smiling while I was looking at clothes for her. I thought she was just being really friendly to the people around us, which she does from time to time, but then I noticed that I had the cart parked in front of a mirror.
Bath Toys: Luckily, I was blessed with a baby that loves bath time. She loves to splash and play with any toy you put in the bathtub. Her all-time favorite bath toy actually came with the baby bath, and it shows that the simplest toys are the best. Her favorite toy is a little blue cup shaped like a whale with holes in the bottom, so the water drains out like shower. She absolutely loves it when you pick up the cup and let the water drain on her. Sometimes I feel like we can’t give her a bath without it. She also has a bath book that she loves. I try to read it to her, but I think she likes it because it makes a big splash in the water.
Animal Toys: Beside her love of other babies, Delilah loves animals. We have two dogs and three cats at home and Delilah is obsessed with them. In the morning when we wake up, Delilah sees her cats on the bed and she sits up and starts talking to them. She has a few stuffed animal toys, and for a while her favorites were a little fox and a puffy bumble bee. I crocheted them for her while I was pregnant, so that made me feel really good. I wanted her to have more animal toys but I couldn’t find a set with much variety. After searching in stores and online, I finally found what I was looking for at Walmart. They had tubes of different animals. I got her four sets: farm animals, jungle animals, forest animals, and ocean animals, so she had a ton of variety to learn different animals. Although I originally bought them to put in her Christmas stocking, I had more than enough to put in her stocking and I decided to give her one early. I gave her the farm animal set that had a chicken, a llama, a donkey, a cow, a pig, and a puppy dog. No big surprise, but the puppy dog is her favorite. She took to it immediately and now she holds it in her hands as she crawls around her room. She even recently started to crawl over to her toy bins to get the animal toys herself, which makes me really excited for her to open the rest of them on Christmas.