'Creative Play for your Baby'

"Play is joy.  When we play, we are fully integrated into ourselves and we feel at one with the world...This is the wisdom of childhood."
'Creative play for your baby.' C.Clouder

I just love this book so much.  I first came to it years ago when my older children were babies, it inspired me then and has done so again the third time around.  It comes very much from a Steiner-Waldorf perspective, a philosophy which really speaks to me and just sounds so very 'right'.  This book has lots to read and to reflect upon as well as very practical guides to making little toys for your baby.  I made this little family of chickens for Isla, they're sitting on a 'nest' of wool, on a 'field' of green velvet (a plaything which is used pretty much every day in this house).

This is one of the things that so interests me about this book and this philosophy.  The idea that children need 'playthings', not necessarily toys which have been bought from a toy shop.  That's not to say that we don't have those things, we do, but I also like to add to the collection in our house things like the green fabric above, handmade little animals and just the wool itself is regularly used for stables and to feed the horses.

They are not the most beautifully crafted animals, but they were made with love.  I see now that they were also made (subconsciously I think?) as a representation of me, the Mother Hen, and her three little chicks.  She likes to keeps them close in her soft, cosy nest.