We just completed the whole Star Wars series and my girls are excitedly anticipating the next one coming out in December. They were sad when we finished the last movie, but happy to know the saga will continue. And they love Darth Vader because they said, “He becomes nice Anakin in the end.” They went from wanting to sport Queen Amadala’s hairstyles to now requesting Princess Leia’s buns. Glow’s favorite is Yoda, and she’s requesting a “Yoda birthday” at a hotel (we will see if that request changes between now and September). I love joking with the kids and trying to do Yoda-speak… “Such good girls you are.” Or “Much disobedience today there has been.” I’m not sure if that’s exactly the way he orders his parts of speech, but my imitation of it definitely gets them rolling on the floor in laughter.

So with their love for Star Wars, comes a lot of Stars Wars play. I’ve shared these blocks before, but the girls just get better and better at creating things with them. They have no Star Wars figures (yet), except a tiny Darth Vader keychain, but they’ve been creating their own with their Tegu blocks. They make all the characters with them! They also make dinosaurs, and use it alongside their pony toys, but lately, it’s been a lot of Star Wars. If you look closely in that last picture, you might even be able to spot their R-2-D-2! I think it looks pretty good and the little wheels let him roll around too!

I love wooden toys, but my girls are regular kids, so they have plenty of character ones too. They get spoiled plenty by the grandparents in the Disney department, everyone showers Brave with Spider-Man things, and My Little Pony is one we commonly get for them. Glow has lot of animal and dinosaur toys, and while I do love handmade and wooden toys (they’re still my favorite kind to give them), I grew up with lots of character plastic toys and turned out fine (and have plenty of good memories). I’m sure they will too. We do try to limit things though, and when they are given new ones, we move some of their other ones along.

When the kids were babies, we were pretty firm with our handmade and wooden toy rule, but we’ve had to adjust and grow as they have gotten older. So as the kids have grown, the toys in our home have changed too. I still love our wooden toys, and I think those still get played with the most, but they mix them with their character toys too! I’m sure in the near future, Star Wars things will be added into the mix. The biggest thing to me though is to limit the amount of toys because they really don’t need much. We try to move things along often, and when they don’t clean, the toys I pick up go into a “prize box.” Then, when they do something that warrants a prize (we don’t use food as a reward), instead of going to the store to buy a new toy, they pick one from the “prize box.” And it’s fair game in there; if something of True’s got taken away, Soul can pick that out and claim it as hers.

p.s. my sister-in-law bought the girls this Tegu block set for Christmas, but we saw how much play they get out of them, so we ordered a couple of these too.