mumsy

I have always been an incredibly big fan of educational toys. From making sure both of my boys have plenty of them to researching various toys on the Internet to see if they pass muster, this is something that has been important to me for awhile. After all, parents are generally pretty vigilant about making sure their children only watch age-appropriate movies and television shows — why shouldn’t they care just as much about the quality of the toys that they play with? And since each of my boys have their own special… quirks, shall we say, I try as hard as I can to choose educational toys that complement these quirks so my boys get the most out of them. For instance, take my one-year-old son. When I’m looking for educational toys for kids for him, I like to go for ones that make noises. He had tubes put into both of his ears about a month and a half ago, and he’s still “catching up” when it comes to hearing everything as it would have been heard if his ears had been functioning normally. And my five-year-old needs toys that encourage him to talk. He’s shy.

My favorite educational toys for toddlers site would have to be MelissaAndDoug.Com. Hands down, they make the most affordable and most educational children’s toys out there! James owns several of their “food tray” toys — I’ve been trying to get both of the boys into more imaginative play, so they received a pretend cooking set last Christmas and some fake food to go along with it. I mean, not only can I name each of the foods with them as they play with it, but it gets their imaginations working and they can start to model something that they’ll be doing when they get old enough to make their own food. To me, that’s a complete win all the way around. It doesn’t really matter how you look at it. Toys can still be fun while they retain their educational components, and Melissa & Doug understand this better than any other educational toy making business I’ve seen!

And based on our own experiences with the pretend food sets that the boys have, I can seriously recommend those — I’d do it in a heartbeat, and that’s exactly why I’m doing it now. Their toys are durable. They’ve survived my youngest son attempting to gnaw on them, as they were actually one of the few toys that Woody Woodpecker over here gave up on trying to gnaw apart. To me, that speaks volumes. They’re also incredibly well-designed and high quality, too! Each of the fruits and vegetables actually look like the fruit and vegetable they’re supposed to look like, too, so there’s no poor modeling here.

If you’ve got a special kid in your life, I would check Melissa & Doug out before I checked out any other site. Seriously, you will not be sorry if you buy their toys from them. Whether they’re a boy or a girl, and no matter what age they are, M & D has you covered!