Outgrowing Toys

Lately, I’ve been notic­ing some­thing at our house. Kael is 4 years old (5 in Novem­ber), and Asa turned 3 in July. It seems to me that right now their inter­ests and abil­i­ties are prob­a­bly as dif­fer­ent as they have been in quite some time. We have def­i­nitely taken advan­tage of the fact that they are close in age when buy­ing toys, games, and other play things around our place. We often buy things for them that we know they will both like and be able to use. Up until now, I think this has worked pretty well for us. They play together pretty well for the most part.

They have great imag­i­na­tions and do a lot of cre­ative play and imag­i­nary play.

Asa with his cape and water shoes giv­ing me the angry eyes.

They have no prob­lems find­ing things to do when we are out and around town at parks or friends’ houses.

Play­ing at one of our favorite parks

The prob­lem (if that’s even what it is) comes when we are at home. Kael is out­grow­ing many of our toys. He’s show­ing more inter­est in read­ing books him­self, spelling things, manip­u­lat­ing num­bers (and mem­o­riz­ing my phone num­ber!), and mazes to name a few of the more “aca­d­e­mic” inter­ests he’s show­ing. He’s show­ing less inter­est in his fire trucks, stuffed ani­mals, and other toys. More and more often, I find that he is get­ting out toys, play­ing for just a few min­utes and mov­ing on to some­thing. Some­times the thing he moves on to is another toy, but many times it’s irri­tat­ing his brother. (No pic­tures of that. )

For a while I thought maybe he wasn’t get­ting enough active play. Maybe he was too tired and needed more sleep. Maybe there was a diet imbal­ance or sen­si­tiv­ity to some­thing we were eat­ing. Then, today a friend men­tioned she and another friend had felt sim­i­larly about their chil­dren who are about Kael’s age.

Another obser­va­tion that my friend made was that Kael’s birth­day and Christ­mas are about six weeks apart. This means that the major­ity of the stuff he gets as gifts comes dur­ing this time period. It also means that by this time of year, most of those things are also geared for some­one almost a year younger than he is. I feel like much of what we have to do around our apart­ment is geared for the 2–4 or 3–5 age range. I also feel like Kael is mov­ing very much into the next bracket what­ever that is. Maybe 4–6 or 5–7? I am not really sure since this is new ter­ri­tory, but I think you prob­a­bly get the idea.

What do I do about this? I’m not really sure. There are a few things that Jason and I have thought about and talked about. None of them seem to really solve the prob­lem, so I’m guess­ing the solu­tion is more of a lit­tle of this, lit­tle of that kind of solu­tion vs. a black and white answer.

We talked about get­ting Kael some new stuff. I feel like cring­ing as I even write that sen­tence. On one hand, I know that stuff (games, toys, books, etc.) is not the answer. How­ever, on the other hand, I under­stand the value of hav­ing age appro­pri­ate and chal­leng­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able for him.

We talked about doing some sort of play­date exchange with a friend where one day a week, Kael would go to a friend’s house to play for a few hours. This would give him a change of scenery, some new toys to play with, and a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than he would have at home. My hes­i­ta­tion with this one is that I can’t just send him to a friend once a week. I would also need to have this friend’s child over to our house for a morn­ing once a week. With the upcom­ing move and a baby on the way this seems over­whelm­ing right now.

We talked (very briefly) about putting him into child­care or preschool for a few hours a week. Nei­ther of these were quite right either. We don’t need some­one to just keep him at a child­care cen­ter and watch him play. We also are not all that excited about most of the options that are avail­able here. There are a cou­ple options that we are com­fort­able with as far as the phi­los­o­phy of the preschool goes, but they don’t work out for other rea­sons. One costs more than we are will­ing or able to spend on a “just because” preschool. Another is just a cou­ple hours in the morn­ing and requires fairly fre­quent par­ent­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion. Between the short time period and the required par­tic­i­pa­tion, I think it would be nearly impos­si­ble to work out the logis­tics after Baby is born.

As I read through this post, I feel like the last part is quite a bit of, here’s what we could do, but here’s why it won’t work sort of excuses. I’m actu­ally a lit­tle hes­i­tant to leave it like that, because when I have a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one with that atti­tude, I usu­ally want to say some­thing like, “Well, I guess you’re stuck.” But, I’m going to leave it mostly as a train of thought sort of post.

So, what would you do? Have your kids ever out­grown their toys? What toys, games, activ­i­ties, sup­plies, books, etc do you rec­om­mend for an almost 5 year old? Any other thoughts or ideas?