[Aditya]

Plays well with children

Some of the most creative gifts our family has enjoyed include:

• a set of 25 die cast Hot Wheels cars for my second daughter’s second birthday (She’s almost 7 and still asks for one of those rugs that they drive on.)
• a box full of funky clothing and jewelry from a second-hand store
• a box full of used kitchen utensils and oven mitts, plastic dishes and silverware
• a box full of cardboard tubes from some sort of printing machine
• a box full of fabric scraps (my five-year-old sewed herself a dress, and I let her wear it in public!)
• a bunch of books the local school district library was discarding
• books
• games (board games, card games … especially in the wintertime when we’re stuck inside more often)
• outdoor play stuff (badminton sets, tennis balls and rackets -- our rackets are wooden, $1 rackets from the thrift store, which work just fine because we don’t know the rules and play for fun -- jump ropes, baseball bats and balls, lawn bowling, horseshoes …
• gardening stuff (real tools, not the plastic ones that break the minute you put them in the dirt)
• arts and crafts supplies (beads, paints, wooden things, doll hair, confetti, kits…)
• a “doctor” set with syringes (not the needle kind, the squirting kind you use to rinse an extracted tooth or give vitamins to your dog), a stethoscope, a blood pressure monitor with instruction card that tells how to read it, a first aid book, Band-Aids, an Ace bandage and a hot water bottle.
• a bunch of old (ugly or gaudy) Christmas decorations, vases, tablecloths, etc.