What are you all getting for your kiddos? Toys seems to get worse and worse every year so I have a hard time finding anything decent these days.
I have boys and girls 5 and under. They absolutely love and I can recommend toys like: magnet tiles (like the Magna/Picasso brands), Duplo Legos, animal figures (like the Schleich brand), the Melissa and Doug food toys (right now the ice cream set is the favorite of those; https://www.melissaanddoug.com/products/scoop-serve-ice-cream-counter), and anything to do with art/coloring/stickers or whatever sort of craft. Now the dumb Duplo likes to shove non-Whites as the figures so avoid that if you can, otherwise my kids love to build with them. Also, I wouldn't get younger kids animal figures like deer or moose with antlers because they will bend them off. I know there's cheaper brands but from my experience anything cheaper than Schleich and they're cheap, ugly trash. Mega Blocks are fun too for them but our set seems to have stopped connecting (they're older hand me downs), is that something that happens often?
Do you all have any recommendations for toys/brands for young children? Or ones to stay away from specifically? Children's book recommendations would be appreciated too! Feel free to use this thread for recommending gifts for other age groups as well.
Perhaps because the box is good for creativity. Back in my days at the Church community center we used to have bricks, like cardboard boxes which we used to build stuff, those were the fun old days.
We also had wooden sticks, 7mm by 20mm by 100mm, just rectangular regular ordinary wood sticks, polished obviously to avoid harm. But those were also very funny to play with because of creativity and all the stuff we could build. Kind of like Lego, but wood instead of plastic.
Gave many of them away to neighbors too because he knew as long as us kids were playing with these sticks, we wouldn't ask for plastic kiked toys often shown in jewbox ads.