Need gift ideas for inspiring children ages 2-5? Good news! This year, I put together a straightforward last minute gift-guide for you. Today I am sharing, toddler holiday and birthday gift ideas that our family enjoys. Most of these gifts are available online (#winning!), you can kick back and relax while these trickle in to your front door one-by-one. If any of you are wondering, I have worked in art education over the years and we have a 3 1/2 year old, so many of these toys are tried and tested by us. I also love gift-giving, so I have spent ample time online browsing and researching these. 
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As a family, there are 3 types of toys that we tend to gravitate towards during play time. They are: imaginative toys, adventure toys and educational toys. I wanted to share our favorite with you!

A while back, my son asked for a dollhouse, so for this year's holiday gift, we are planning to find a vintage wooden dollhouse to and fix it up. This is also a project for me as well that offers me a chance to get out my detail sander and refinish the wood. I figure that he will use it to play with everything from dinosaurs to animals and dolls. I like that it creates an opportunity for endless imaginative play. The figurines: the people, farm animals, and little cloth dolls can all be used. Full disclosure, when my son saw me typing up this gift guide, he told me that he liked the farm animals set below, the most of all. In fact, a farm house was one of his big gifts last year and he still plays with it all the time. 

Lastly, I have always loved these rainbow hand kites as something that inspires explorative movement and dance. We own a similar ribbon toy and although my son is 3 1/2, he still uses it. Really, it is something that I think he would have enjoyed sooner! 

This next bunch of toys is for the toddler who loves wildlife and adventure. As a family, we try to spend as much time outdoors as we can and we like to travel often. I like toys that inspire that sense of adventure. We recently gifted these binoculars. They are smaller than I imagined, which is actually the perfect size for a child and the image is quite clear. Next up, the other day, I saw a picture of kids playing with Lincoln Logs and it took me waaay back. I used to love playing with my all-wood set of those and building for hours on end.  

We have some favorite educational toys too! You might notice that this list contains 2 train sets. We have both and we like each one for different reasons. The Duplo train is electronic, and runs on it's own, whereas the wooden train set by Brio offers endless opportunities for imaginative play. I feel like the Brio could be for a child who is slightly older. My son loves playing with his bells. I came across this set, when momducator showed us how her 3 year old was able to follow musical notes and play songs using individual bells. I think that it could help younger kids to recognize musical notes, and we had my son earn each bell one by one, so that he became familiar with the sounds. The Picasso tiles are another hit, that I see gets played with a lot. The tiles could be great for collaborative play with siblings and friends too.  

I hope you have enjoyed hearing a little bit about our family's favorite types of toys for kids ages 2-5. If you are still in full on holiday shopping mode (like us;) then happy online shopping to you!
I hope the little one in your life will enjoy a few of these too.

What are your favorite toddler toys around the house? I would love to hear your gift ideas too!

If you liked this, then you will love our Nature Boys Bedroom reveal!

It's finally here! Week 7 of the One Room Challenge, which means we have reached the finish line on this one and it's time for the much anticipated reveal. 

For this project, I am re-designing our son's nursery turned guest room, into a boy's nature inspired bedroom. You can catch up on the previous week's posts here: 
Inspiration/ Product Boards/ Before Photos/ Paint guide/ Painting/ Decor + Bedding Sneak Peak
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This how the room looked before, when we had temporarily been using it first as a nursery then as a guest room. We always planned to transform it back into our son's bedroom.

Welcome to A Day in the Life, where lately it has been creative and full of projects! One of those projects is the One Room Challenge, if you have been following along, thank you! We have made it to Week 6 of the challenge, and the weeks are going by too fast, am I right?!

You can read more about the ORC here, and find out what all the other participants are doing! 

Today, with only 1 week left of the challenge, I have the Nature Boy's Bedroom installation planned for this weekend. I am hitting pause on the progress button, until I can get both the painters and my handyman over to help me. Both have been so busy over the past couple of weeks. 

So I guess we can all just stay in bed today...;) Unless you want to make Graphic Flag Pendant Banner with me?  

Here is a quick how-to project that I hope you will enjoy! You can use it as a guide to create a graphic flag banner for your children's space or your event.  It is fairly simple project with a short list of supplies. In the spirit of adventure for Nature Boy's Bedroom, we wanted our banner to read E-X-P-L-O-R-E. ​

Continue reading to see how to make a Graphic Flag Pendant Banner, receive the full list of supplies and see a sneak peak of the bedding we chose!