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We are lucky in the West, or most of it anyway, because the European Community, north America and Canada have strict regulations on how safe children’s toys must be. Despite this, there are lots of unscrupulous people about who will import cheap junk toys that could be dangerous to children, which means that anyone purchasing kids’ toys has to have their wits about them.

Having said that, the bigger stores do do their best to weed out the rogue importers and in fact most of the unsafe kids’ toys are found out about before they go on sale. Be wary in discount shops and outdoor markets though.

Once you get your safe children’s toys home, the time to be wary starts. This is because most accidents in the home involving toys do not happen to the person that the toys were purchased for. This is because adults trip over them. The stairs are the worst

The first thing that anyone buying toys must look for is the label. In the United States this is known as the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) and in Europe it is called the Certificat European (CE). However, be cautious, because these labels can be forged very easily.

If you are not used to purchasing toys for children, the next indicator to look for is the age bracket for which the toy is intended. Typically the indicator will give 5+ or 7-12, so you still have to exercise some judgment.

Educational toys are important to children and one of the best of these that you can add to as the child gets older is Lego. Duplo is the kind of Lego that is most suitable to very young children. This is because Duplo building blocks are larger that the regular Lego building blocks so that small hands can manage them easily.

One of the worst dangers for very young children is choking. Young children put everything into their mouths but Lego has manufactured these Duplo building blocks too big to swallow.

As your child gets older, you can add to the Lego set right up to adulthood. There are Lego electric motors for teenagers and there are numerous adults that have continued using Lego well past their Twenties.

If however your child does have an accident with a toy, you must attempt to find out how it happened immediately after seeing to your child. If the accident was obviously the child’s fault or someone else’s, you can report it if you like, but if the difficulty came about because of a difficulty or failure inherent in the toy, you should report it.

The first place to report the toy is to the local authorities and then you should inform the manager of the shop where you purchased it from. Keep the toy until the wheels of bureaucracy turn enough to get around to you

They will get back to you and you might save other children and their parents from going through the same problems that you did.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a lot of topics, but is presently involved with train sets for kids. If you would like to know more about train sets for kids, please go over to our website for some great offers.

Lego keyrings are a bright concept from the Lego Group and Lego UK. Lego keyrings are meant to be amusing, yet handy items for the Lego enthusiast both young and old. Some of the Lego keyrings can be difficult to acquire and are encouraging collectors to start a collection.

You can buy Lego keyrings on web sites or at almost any Lego shop. There are tens of different sorts ranging from simple coloured building blocks to Lego Star Wars figures and they are not expensive either.

Lego has been very smart with their keyrings because they are handy little presents for all ages. They are fun items, they do not cost over a few of pounds or dollars and the numbers manufactured of some of them are really quite small ensuring a healthy secondary market for collectors on Internet auction sites such as eBay.

At the moment there are about four dozen different Lego keyrings varying from a straightforward, traditional, red Lego building block with eight stubs to Darth Vader from the Lego Star Wars figures assortment.

If you would like to start a collection of Lego keyrings, go to one of the Lego sellers on the Internet to see what is obtainable and then go to eBay to find out what has already come and gone. You may be surprised at how a keyring that was bought last year for a few pounds has trebled in value by now.

The most popular of the Lego keyrings are the small figurines. There are policemen, firemen, teachers, postmen, nurses, GP’s, spacemen, Batman, Lego Star Wars figures, Lego Harry Potter figures. All kinds, in fact.

Some of the Lego keyrings are only sold in sets and some are sold at a cheaper cost if purchased in a set. There is a colossal second market on eBay for the new Lego characters and the older ones as well, so if you are interested in beginning a new hobby buying and selling Lego figures, have a look in a Lego shop on the Internet for special offers and discounted deals.

If on the other hand, you are not too interested in the Lego keyrings but would still like to be in on the action, you could check out the secondary market in Lego figures. Lego figures can be bought separately, but they normally come in a package as with the Lego Star Wars figures or the Harry Potter sets.

One suggestion is that these figures are usually relatively expensive, whereas the keyrings are not, so you could purchase the Lego keyring of the figure you want and cut the keyring part off. This is a fantastic way of building up your population of Lego characters at a fraction of the standard cost and the only difference is that you cannot remove the arms and legs from the keyring figures like you can from the dearer other type.

Why would you like to take the arms and legs off anyway? They can only be lost or damaged by removing them. No, go for the Lego keyrings instead.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with Silver Cross Rocking Horses. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at Rocking Horses for sale.

Is it possible for children to have too many toys? I think that there probably is a case against children having too many toys. I grew up with four younger brothers (about two years between each of us) and our fairly large communal bedroom was lined on two walls with shelves from floor to ceiling with toys and each Christmas there were sacks full of even more playthings that we did not have any more room for.

I was the eldest, so you would think that I could pass my baby toys down the line once I had no use for them. That worked while my brothers were actually babies, but as their consciousness started to develop they wanted to play with what I was playing with and so all the toys that I used from, say three to eight years of age were ostracized by my brothers as they leap-frogged past those years and went directly to year eight and nine with me.

But we never got rid of those five years worth of overlooked toys or any other toys either. This would have been in the Fifties and Sixties and I do not believe that recycling was quite the buzz word back then that it is today.

My parents did not throw them out, we only squirreled them away on the top shelves, which we could not reach anyway. I assume that after sitting up there for ten years they were eventually thrown out but I do not know as I had already left home by then.

The point is that those superfluous toys were not doing anyone in our family any good and they were taking up space. It would have been far better to have given them away or not even to have purchased some of them in the first place.

We always had to have ‘one each’ so that there would be less squabbling. So, we had things like five plastic trumpets, five tin drums, five plastic guns, five of this and five of that and we never used them after Christmas Day. We enjoyed playing together at board games like Monopoly, Risk and cards and although I, being the oldest, won nine times out of ten, my brothers never seemed to care.

We also had a train set, Scalectrix and a big box of Lego. We would spend all weekend developing various scenarios with combinations of the train set, a roadway and Lego houses and Lego railway platforms. OK, these three toys were almost certainly expensive, but they were quality, versatile, could be used in combination and, in a way, were educational. These were the toys that we stored on the lower shelves.

What I am saying is that more is not always better and in the case of toys, more can be merely a waste of money. Instead of all that junk on the top shelves, which was usually donated by aunties and uncles by the way, it would have been better to buy us a new bridge for the railway set or a new chicane for the Scalectrix or another box of building bricks for our Lego collection.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a variety of subjects, but is now concerned with Lego Keyrings. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Lego UK.

If you are going to be looking after children either your own or other people’s, you will naturally have to have some apparatus. Your training will have taught you what you are required to have by law, items such as safety equipment, cots, high-seats and strollers, but you will also need some toys. Which ones though, there are so so many and they are not cheap either?

Well, the first thing to take into account is the age group of the children that you will have under your supervision. I am sure that your training will have already taught you that babies have different needs from toddlers and so on up the age scale. Babies cannot get about (or not much) so they need to have their playthings near at hand.

Having said that, babies are not even very good with their hands. They just seem to want to stuff items into their mouths with them, so the safest alternatives for babies are visually and aurally stimulating toys that will neither choke nor poison them. Twirling mobiles, colourful rattles, an interesting blanket, wallpaper with images of animals like Beatrix Potters menagerie of rabbits, foxes and ducks.

It is probably better if you do not provide any toys that are going to be sucked and then passed around other kids for fear of cross-infection. Let their parents provide the babies’ own cuddly toys and teddy bears et cetera. You may like to advise parents not to purchase babies’ toys which come apart easily or have buttons or loose eyes because of the danger of choking.

In the next age bracket, the struggling toddler, kids are beginning to become curious and are ‘into everything’. They still want to put everything in their mouths though, so the same warnings apply as before, but the toys can and should be more challenging. Books with a thin storyline and big pictures are pretty useful as are fish tanks that are safely out of reach. Children love to watch a busy fish tank and it is better than TV.

Building blocks and even the babies’ version of Lego can be introduced at this age although the toddlers are still a bit young for them. Toddlers will begin to become attached to favourite toys and like to carry them around with them at this age, so soft balls, dolls, rattles, and educational toys appropriate to the age group are good.

After approximately eighteen months, educational toys like blocks and Lego (or Duplo) are even more important, so are books, but children of this age like to bang things and create a noise as well. A plinky-plonky instrument like a toy xylophone or a plastic piano are good for fulfilling these needs.

After roughly two years of age, children start to play with other children and Wendy Houses and toy tea sets are useful for encouraging this. They will also like to move about and drive toy cars and tricycles. Children should be encouraged to play in a safe outdoor environment now as well, if the weather is appropriate. Low-level swings and slides are fun as is a sand pit, if you can stop the local cats from using it as a public lavatory.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with Lego Keyrings. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Lego UK.