Occasionally we buy toys for Ingrid. Not too many, because most stuff that’s out there is not at all appealing. Lots of cheap plastic and things that go beep. Sometimes, however, we find things we like.

But our opinion is not a very good predictor of Ingrid’s opinion. We find something and think, oh, she’ll like this one! If I was a kid then I would certainly enjoy playing with this! And she just goes “meh” and ignores it completely. That’s what happened with a lovely colourful wooden bead frame from IKEA for example. I doubt if she’s even spent half an hour playing with it. In fact we should probably just throw it out or give it away.

Sometimes she’s just not ready for a certain toy yet. That’s the case for soft toys, I suspect. She has never shown any interest in any of her cuddly soft animals.

For quite a while I thought that was also the case for building blocks. We have a wagon with a set of (lovely colourful wooden) blocks. She has shown some interest in pulling the wagon along. She is happy to knock down towers that I build. But she is not at all interested in building anything herself. So I figured that she’s not into building things yet. It’ll come.

Wrong. We’d just given her the wrong building materials. Who wants colourful wooden blocks when you can get rolls of brown packing tape? (After I took this picture she went on to complete her tower of 4 rolls of tape, perfectly aligned, but it got demolished when she tried to pick the whole structure up and carry it away.)

Tape tower	Tape bangles