Sunday, September 14, 2008

Favorite toys -- wooden trains

Hands-down, wooden trains were the toy that got the most play at our house for about 5 years, starting when my boy was 1.5. For years they got so much use that we kept them in the living room; Daddy or I built a layout nearly every day.


We eschewed a train table; our layouts were just too big. Sometimes they wouldn't even fit in the living room and would snake around the dining room table too.

These days the trains do get less use; they're in the upstairs playroom now. But they still come out every month -- and now the kids build the layouts themselves.

We started out with Brio trains but around 3 years old my boy started asking for Thomas engines. I was resistant -- why add to commercialism? -- but came around. Having engines with names added another dimension to their play -- at the height of their train interest the kids acted out story lines from the original books and made up their own stories about interactions between the various engines.

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