Baby & Toddler Toys

From the first rattle to the push walker:

baby toys follow what the child can do more than the age printed on the box. The early months are soft rattles, teethers and a play gym, a padded mat under an arch of hanging toys to bat at while lying on the back. Once a baby sits up come activity cubes, stacking rings and cups, shape sorters and bath toys. When the pulling-up starts, the push walker arrives, a wheeled panel of buttons with a handle to walk behind, followed by the talking phones, tablets and puppies of Fisher-Price and VTech. Wooden ones run alongside: rainbow stackers, peg puzzles and busy boards sold as Montessori toys. Big first bricks such as Duplo and Mega Bloks sit with building sets and blocks, cuddly soft toys with plush toys, and battery ride-ons with vehicles and RC.

The language inside a talking toy:

decides whether it suits a Spanish-speaking home. Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn line comes in English-only, bilingual and multilanguage versions, and VTech makes separate Spanish and English editions of many of its baby toys. One brought down from the United States in a relative’s suitcase will usually sing only in English. Bilingual models change language with a small switch, so a short video of a few buttons pressed in each setting tells you more than any photo. The age label matters as well: toys made for the cot and the floor have nothing that comes off, while one meant for older children may carry pieces small enough to swallow, and a rough check at home is whether a piece slips through the cardboard tube of a toilet roll.

Play gyms and push walkers, where the resale money is:

a rattle or a teether costs little new and hardly resells, since most parents want anything that goes in the mouth to be new. The large pieces are another matter. A branded musical play gym or push walker runs from about Q500 to Q900 new in Guatemala, and a baby gets a few months out of it before crawling or toddling away. Because of that short life a used one can be close to new, and its price rests on what is missing or broken rather than on age. A complete gym with every hanging toy and a piano that still plays keeps much of its value; with the piano gone quiet, it is just a mat with an arch.

A squeeze toy with black specks inside:

has mould in it, as do most bath toys with a hole underneath once they have been used for a while. Squeeze one onto a white tissue to see. Sealed ones with no hole are the only kind worth taking second-hand. On electronic toys the battery door is held by a small screw: check the head is not stripped, then try every button and both volume settings. Count the pieces against the photo on the box, because shape sorters lose their shapes, stackers lose a ring and piggy-bank toys lose their coins. On wooden toys, look for chipped paint, splinters and cracks along the grain, all of which end up in a child’s mouth.

A box of outgrown baby toys, sorted by stage:

moves faster than the same toys listed one by one. Group them by what the baby was doing with them, lying down, sitting up or walking, photograph each group laid out on the floor, and give the brand and the age on the box. For anything that talks, say which language it speaks and whether it has a switch; for a play gym or a walker, film a few seconds with the music working. Say how the toys were cleaned and whether there are pets or smokers at home. A parent coming in from Villa Nueva or Cobán by bus will want to know whether the play gym’s arch folds flat into a bag, and whether the walker’s handle comes off.