Cool stuff for kids

Sometimes I feel like I spend my life clearing up tat. Plastic tat, at that.

From living room to kitchen to dining room to bedroom, my toddler leaves a trail of sparkly rubbish in her wake. As fast as I clear it out of the house, it makes its way back in again, like a persistent weed taking over a beautiful flower bed. Not that my house is like a beautiful flower bed, but you get the analogy.

In my attempts to banish the tatty paraphenalia, I have taken on a new game plan. This one involves finding new, better stuff to rival the plastic.

I’m drawn towards wooden toys, bright and bold colours rather than insipid sparkly ones, preferably with some kind of retro slant. The kind of things I don’t mind clogging up my living room. I know, I am a toy snob. Perhaps I wouldn’t be this way if we lived in a huge house with a playroom and deep cupboards, so I wouldn’t have to spend my evenings knee-deep in holographic stickers and dry felt-tip pens. That’s my excuse anyway.

In my quest for cool kids’ stuff, I have even created a list on my Shopcade account. Shopcade is a social shopping site. It works a bit like Pinterest, in that you create boards of things you like, but rather than sitting and looking at them all day, you can actually buy them. You get points for your activity on the site (when people follow you or like the items you list etc) and – as we all know – points mean prizes.

This is a snapshot of my Cool Kids Stuff list:

It also features these beauties:

Hamleys Kettle, £8, via Shopcade

Science Museum Space Hopper, £19.99, via Shopcade

Habitat Wooden Skittles, £20, via Shopcade

I could live with these in any room in the house. Honest.

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Disclosure: As a Shopcade ambassador I occasionally get sent pretty things from the site. All opinions are my own. I really do hate plastic tat.