Experience Presents
Kids love spending time with their aunties and uncles. For one thing, they’re less likely to get into trouble, more likely to be able to eat junk-food, and if you’re a young auntie or uncle without kids of your own and a habit of self-censoring, they might even hear you accidentally swear–for a child, that’s pretty much a trifecta of fun! It’s for this reason that one of the best presents to buy a child is tickets to see a concert or movie that they’re into–with you! The best part is that it’s usually just a credit card and the click of a mouse away, so there is no need to plan buying a gift into your workday. While a live show of Dora the Explorer or the Wiggles might not be your cup of tea, it’ll all be worth it when you see how excited your little niece or nephew is at the idea of hanging out one-on-one with you.

Fashion
Once kids get to a certain age, their parents go from being the centre of their known universe and the curators of all things cool to being about as uncool and embarrassing as it gets. It’s a natural side-effect of evolution, and eventually it’ll turn back around again, but in the meantime it means that you get to step into the ‘cool auntie or uncle’ position, which is a pretty enviable place to be. For this reason, things like fashion and music will be your areas of expertise in the eyes of your small relation, but only until you too are relegated to the uncool pile–so make the most of it while it lasts! Take the opportunity to buy them a grown-up fashion accessory like a bracelet, necklace or baseball cap that isn’t from a kid’s store. This serves the dual purpose of making them feel incredibly adult and cool, and you not having to make a diversion to a toy store!

If it’s toys they want, there are still ways of getting the toy they want without traipsing around the mall. Online toys are the busy auntie or uncle’s dream, because it’s possible to choose the perfect gift and have it wrapped, sent to your niece or nephew’s house and waiting for their birthday within a matter of days. Now that’s service!

Choosing a theme

As with decorating your own house, decorating a dollhouse can become a lot more cohesive when you decide on the theme you want in your house. This theme can be a colour scheme (perhaps you’d like an apple-green interior?) a country theme (oriental furniture anyone?) or a stylistic choice (perhaps you’d like the beach-house of your dreams?). Whatever the theme, this gives you a basis to start hunting around for dollhouse furniture which suits your style, and also helps people who may be thinking of getting you some dollhouse furniture as a present!

Room by Room

Because furnishing all in one go can be both costly and time-consuming, why not think about committing yourself to one room at a time? You can even apply different themes to different rooms–you could have a ‘united nations’ of rooms, a different country theme for each room!

Making furniture

One way to go about furnishing your dollhouse and giving it that extra personalised touch is to make the furniture yourself. While this takes more time, you’ll be able to build custom furniture to whatever weird and wonderful specifications you come up with! You can buy patterns for furniture online or use specific software to design your own furniture and then print out the patters yourself. There are even programs where you can upload a picture of a piece of your own furniture and turn it into a perfect miniature for your dollhouse!

Buying furniture

Buying dollhouse furniture is another way to fill up your rooms, and with more and more online toys distributors popping up, you’re bound to find a whole host of styles to choose from. There are also several stores that specialise in dollhouse furnishings, and these will give you endless ideas about what you want yours to look like.

However you decide to go about furnishing your dollhouse, the key to the process is to remember that it’s part of the joy–dollhouses allow us to be creative and explore our imaginations, so buying a bunch of ready-made, matching items to furnish it with doesn’t let us fully enjoy the experience. Involve your kids in the creative process and make your dollhouse into the mini-mansion you always dreamed of!

Sometimes you can get lucky with a random guess, but there are only two ways to know for sure that you’re getting the girl something she can enjoy. The first approach is to make a call to your sister or brother and ask what your niece loves more than anything.

This method works, but we don’t really like this approach because it’s kind of admitting defeat. A gift should really be from the heart, and if you have to ask someone else what to get, that’s sort of like cheating.

What we like is, if you don’t already know what you want to get for your niece, spend a little time with her. Take your niece out for lunch, go to the playground together, do something to hang out with the kid for a little while, and you should know exactly what to get her before the afternoon is up.

You’re going to know right away. When the birthday season is approaching, kids generally find themselves incapable of talking about anything besides exactly what they’d love to open on their special day.

Besides spending an afternoon together being a perfect way to get some precious intel on that baby doll toy your niece really wants, it’s also a great way to get reacquainted with the kid. It’s important for children to have a full family’s worth of positive adult role models. Not just a mom and a dad, but uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even older siblings all play a key role in shaping a child’s idea of the value of family, and even their own sense of identity. Spending some time with the kid is going to wind up being more valuable than any toy you’re going to buy them.

Now, once you have some ideas for what to get the kid, you’re going to want to make a call to the parents. You want to make sure that you’re not going to wind up both getting her the same present, of course. It can be helpful, though, to get toys that complement each other. If your sister or brother is getting the kid a Wall-E DVD, you can go ahead and get your niece something like the Wall-E VTECH Learning Laptop.

A gift is an expression of a certain idea: I love you, I care about you, I want you to be happy, and I know what you want. Just asking the parents what to get the kid will wind up with a great toy to unwrap at their birthday party, but you’ll be missing out on the very most important part of what buying a gift is all about. The personal connection that a gift evokes can only be accomplished when it truly is from the heart.

BRATZ BABYZ Bubble Butterfliez Yasmin

The baby girls with a passion for fashion!

Bratz Babyz Bubble Butterfliez are cute, they’re fanciful, and they have a secret! Remove their beautiful wings and the wings become real bubble wands for you (bubble solution is not included)! Their tail & top change colour in water and their flowers squirt water.

FEATURES:

* Flowers squirts water!
* Wings become bubble wand for you!
* Tail & top change colour in water!
* Bug friend.

Ages: 4 years & up
Item Size: approx. 11 cm tall
Package Size: approx. 20 x 17 x 8 cm

See more Bratz

It’s a little tougher with boys. Sailor Moon has plenty of cool male characters like Tuxedo Mask, but just try telling a boy that. Most boys won’t touch anything pink, anything frilly, and if it’s purple, it had better be a dark purple.

So let the following list serve as two things…

If you’re shopping for girls: Some recommendations

If you’re shopping for boys: A sign reading “AVOID! This means YOU!” in big, pink letters.

ANYTHING PINK OR WEARING A DRESS

Take for example the HASBRO Littlest Pet Shop Tricks and Talent Show Playset. Everyone likes dogs doing tricks right? Well, technically, yeah, but this playset is packed with pink, and all the dogs in the Littlest Pet Shop line have adorable sparkling eyes and big floppy heads. Boys like their dogs wearing bowler caps and smoking cigars and flanked by hyperactive chihuahua sidekicks. The Littlest Pet Shop is a great line of toys for girls, but give it to a boy, and he’s probably going to hide it where his friends won’t see it when they come over.

As for dresses, Dora has had some crossover appeal. Any kid, boy or girl, can get behind fun adventures and a monkey sidekick named Boots, and the producers have responded with the more boy-centric show Go, Diego, Go!, so Dora toys aren’t totally out of the running for boys. However, you may want to stay far, far away from toys like the Dora Stylish Scents Lemon Drop. The name alone sounds too girly for most boys to get behind, even if she comes with her very own brush so you can keep her stylish hair looking neat and sweet!

STUFFED ANIMALS

It’s a fine line with stuffed animals. It’s not always easy to tell which ones are more for boys and which ones are more for girls. One thing you might notice, though, is that girls tend to be a little more precious about their stuffed animals. A boy might take his sock monkey with him everywhere he goes, but he’ll probably leave him in the car rather than drag him through the grocery store. Girls are much more likely to be interested in something like the Paws Puppy Backpack, then. Guess you could say that the rule of thumb is that there’s an invisible “cuteness border”. Big sparkly eyes, huge floppy ears, and centimetre thick fur are great for stuffed animals for girls, while boys tend to be put off by anything too adorable.

As always, it really does come down to the individual kid who you’re shopping for. If you know that your son loves the Littlest Pet Shop line, go ahead and indulge him. The invisible lines of gender and age are only really a way to narrow down the selection when you’re not entirely sure what to get your nephew or niece, a kid you babysit, etcetera. If you’re a parent, it’s usually kind of hard not to know exactly what your kids want.

There are several varieties of dollhouses available, but what really counts is the accessories. Just as a new home isn’t quite yours until you’ve got it just how you like it, a doll house isn’t quite right until it’s got all the right furniture and decor. Looking online for accessories is a great way to select from a wider variety, rather than just trying to see if the local department store has just the right stuff.

Of course, selecting the dollhouse itself is an important process, too. What is your child’s dream house? A nice, rustic place out in the country, or a three story mansion in the hills? Shopping at online toy stores, it won’t be too hard to find just the right home for six inch mom and dad.

Something else to keep in mind is, of course, your child’s age. There are plenty of dollhouses available for older children, full of delicate, realistic windows and functioning doors, as well as perfectly scaled accessories, like dressers with real working drawers. For younger children, though, these more complex dollhouses can be a little too fragile. You may even find some neat doll houses in the baby toys / baby products section when you buy toys online or at toy shops.

Plenty of simple wooden dollhouses are available for the child who’s not quite ready for something made out of delicate plywood and tiny brass door knobs. These include plastic dollhouses, such as those made by Fisher Price, as well as wooden dollhouses, by companies like Pintoys.

Once your child has a fully furnished dollhouse of their own, they’ll need a family to live in that home, of course. Pintoy makes adorable little rag doll style families to occupy your child’s miniature dream home, while Fisher Price offers fully posable plastic dolls, similar to Barbie dolls.

Other accessories offered include dogs, complete with miniature doghouses, dog beds, and food and water bowls, as well as miniature vehicles, such as the Fisher Price Loving Family Minivan and SUV, to facilitate miniature vacations and road trips (or just some daily errands, it’s all part of the dollhouse experience).

One of the great things about good dollhouses is that they become more than childhood pretend play toys. Many adults still have their childhood dollhouses, while others will purchase new ones. In fact, the miniature and doll market for adults is very popular right now.

By providing loads of customization options for the dedicated doll houses hobbyist, it’s sort of the flipside of Railroad Modelling, providing hours of in-depth enjoyment for hobbyists of any age. It can become a passion that grows right alongside the child, into adulthood, as they outfit their dollhouse with more sophisticated features. On the higher end, there is even miniature wallpaper and carpeting you can add to make the home truly your own.

Of course, forgetting for a moment all of the high end accessories you can add onto a dollhouse, the primary appeal of a dollhouse is simple. You get to have your own tiny dream house. With some of the better dollhouses, you can even do some remodelling (once you’ve learned how to operate dollhouse tools and building materials, of course) and other serious customization, all without having to expend the immense time and effort involved in changing your actual home. For both children and adults, this is a wonderful form of expression and a great way to empower oneself.