The hottest new toy in town: hot glue sticks!?

I've started thinking about what to get Fischer for Christmas. But what do you get someone whose favorite "toys" are:

5 no-slip mats that go on the bottom of the tub, 4 sticky, dirty hot glue sticks, and 3 little men. At any given time you can find Fischer walking around with one of these ...collections. The collections rarely inter-mingle with each other, but all of them can be transformed into vehicles, people, places, animals, etc. By the way, those three little men from left to right are: Johnny Appleseed, James and Fischer.

So I guess I can definitely say he likes collections of things. I'm seriously thinking of getting him a bag of hot glue sticks to replace the disgusting ones he loves so much. Write that in the baby book! For your third Christmas, Mommy and Daddy bought you a bag of glue sticks! You deserved it!!

Today's collection of choice was 4 baby pop beads. Now these were extra exciting because one of them contained something that could have been cheese or could have been a carrot! We had to wait quite awhile for the thing to shrivel enough to fall out and be labeled. (it was a carrot).

Yesterday morning Fischer busiest himself in the living room with zillions of little tiny pie tins. He stacked and sorted and displayed them in a variety of designs. When I walked into the room he stood up ... beaming ... and proudly announced "Mommy, look at all this crap! I've been doin' this for hours!" (Crap??)

Anyway, the top 3 pictures, along with Legos are his most prized possessions. He has lots of toys but these are the favorites.

The author of Rocks in my Dryer posts a weekly group blogging thing called Works for Me Wednesday. She chooses a topic then everyone blogs about it and she links to their sites. Well the other day the topic was toys. Works For Me: Toys Worth Buying (Subtitled: I DO NOT WANT ANY MORE JUNK IN MY HOUSE).

The great thing is that under her post is a list of 250 links to other moms telling their kids favorite toys, and there are even more ideas in the comments! So... I spent a few minutes perusing them and found some really great ideas, for toys that kids actually play with for more than a minute. There were many frugal and unique ideas too, like buying Halloween costumes after Halloween and making a "dress-up box". So fun!

I'm pretty sure I'm going with games this year. We recently bought a few and he is having a blast! We play them everyday. Now that he is almost 3, there are plenty of games that he can play... so we're into it. Not to mention, all of his games I foresee ending up in my classroom someday when I'm back at work and he has grown out of them. OK let's be honest, that's where I see all of his books going and a number of his other belongings. I really do try to get him things HE likes and not just what I like, but...