easy baby stimulation toys

Heres a few ideas for some simple but effective home made baby toys. I'm sure many of you have made them or seen them, but they might help someone. If anyone else has any other ideas, we'd love to hear them, I love making something simple that my daughter loves to play with. DH of course wants to make a rocking horse

bottle top toys
* collect the tops from milk and juice bottles in all different colours, carefully put a hole in the top, sand the rough edges then thread them on some elastic, tie, loop or seal the ends (we used heat shrink over a loop). We used all different colours but you can use two contrasting colours or whatever you like, our DD loved batting it when younger and now enjoys full hands on play, shaking, rattling, chewing etc etc We are moving on to counting the tops with her and naming the colours.

* place several bottle tops in one of those net bags that fruit comes in and tie / seal the ends safely. This makes a good rattle and 'touchy feely' toy, again very popular with our daughter

crinkly, rustley toy
place some cellophane or other noisy material inside a net fruit bag and tie the ends. Great for hands on touchy feely play, this toy gets fought over at coffee group! Its so simple to make, we have made emergency ones when out after buying ourselves a lunch of those 2 for $6 mini quiches from Countdown and some fruit. both this and the bottle top version can be made using socks or tights/stockings too.

glitter thing

Fill a clean drinks bottle (500-600mL water or coke bottle for example) with water and add some glitter or other shiny shapes. Seal well with glue and/or tape. This was great from when our daughter was young as a visual stimulation toy, now she can turn it over and over herself to watch the glitter move. Once she decides to start crawling, she can roll it along the floor to chase.

rattles
there are so many ways to make rattles. we have used a cardboard tube, sealed one end with card and tape, filled with stone or bark then sealed the other end. Older kid can easily make this themselves. we have used old plastic bottles and filled them with whatever was available to make a noise. This I guess leads on to saucepans, containers and wooden spoons all over the kitchen floor.

visual stimulation
We made our own visual stimulation cards by drawing lines, boxes, squiggles etc on white paper with black and red vivids. There are heaps of websites with patterns to copy or download. we found some good sheep and butterfly ones that we stuck on card and hung from DD's play gym. She loved watching them turn in a breeze. We put some in sight of her bassinet and often found her awake staring at them, so much better than awake and crying! of course, asleep would have been better, but she is a shocker for sleep.

If I think or find any others, I'll add to this, and I'm looking forward to reading others ideas.

You can make you own play gyms too - need 1x long tube and you can paint it or put coloured paper or duraseal or leave plain. Get wool or string and you can dangle whatever you want from it and at different heights etc. Put it between 2 dining chairs and there you go!

We've made quite a few toys for dd!

When they are about 1yo you can get an ice cream container and cut shapes into the top and find objects for them to post into it!