what toys are we NOT buying this year - lessons learned from previous years!

[curlycat]

no more make your own badges, stickers, gift cards rubbish - they never work properly.

moon sand

hama beads

hot wheels tracks that take 6 hours to build and 2 seconds to break

anything that is meant to churn out anything near edible food - think chocoltae coins/ cupcakes.

anyone care to add - i wish i had this kind of list when my dc were little and i could have saved a fortune since i've bought most of this tat at some point over the last 11 years!

Barbies ours went in the bin, clothes rip, hair frizzed.
Polly pocket
Wooden dolls house furniture and dolls,
DD fills the house with playmobile instead.
Geo mag, floppy useless models and all those bloody balls
Any kind of children's cooking, sewing or craft kit, get the adult ones.
Your much better of going to hobby craft and buying lots of card, foam, glitter and sequins and a pot of "Tacky glue" ( strong PVA allows trustworthy children to stick thinks one so they stay. Not for little DCs because it's expensive and comes in small bottles, but worth having to so mum you can get things to stay put)
the glue and paint in kits is junk and all the separate boxes with tiny bits in are the pits.
Hama beads are a pain, but nothing is better at keeping a gang of 8-10 year old girls happy. Get a couple of idea books, a stack of boards and the biggest box of beads you can ( then you won't feel guilty when you hover a few). Seriously, compared to listing to them fighting on the Wii it's bliss.

Help sleep time, too many typos

Playmobil is a pain, but it gets played with and DD will buy it herself. Anything that reduces the amount of money she has for SIMs add ons is seriously good!

What do you mean, wooden dolls house and furniture? I am planning on spending quite a lot on buying that for DD's Christmas present this year...

It looks great! I reckon I'd play with it quite a bit. :)

I spent a fortune on lovely wooden toys for my DD. She much prefers plastic tat. It's a lot cheaper and she actually plays with it.

I second the Play-Doh Ice Cream Palour. The dough is just too dense to easily flow through the machine; it gets stuck everywhere; it's a sod to clean; and it doesn't work anything like it looks on the ad (big shock )

I refuse to buy character playsets. They're not durable enough when they get thrown or I step on them

Have they improved the ninky nonk in the last few years? That was utter crap- much tinier than expected considering the price and when you pushed it along the carriages kept coming off. Think it was the first Xmas after itng had started on telly and I thought the design has been rushed through just to get it in the shops in time for Xmas.

Dont buy a dolls house, we got one a few years ago and it was never played with, sylvanian families on the other hand gets played with (may be its because the figures are cute little animals).

Moanna- the duplo does not work with the smaller lego , so if you think they will grow out of it go for the smaller lego (just the box of mixed bits not the sets).

Also agree with character sets (peppa, ben and holly, fireman sam ect..), they are poorly made and the bits get lost after a couple days. We had the play-dough ice cream thing 2 years ago after dd1 begged for it (searched high and low to get the bloody thing), we were very disapointed as dd1 did not have the stength to push the playdough through the nozzles and it was nothing like it was on TV, it got played with once and then put away.

Agree with the dolls house, I spent £££ on a lovely one for DD and its hardly been played with, wish I'd gone with Sylvanian Families.

You see DD plays with her dolls house quite a lot.

She prefers it to her playmobil but she's only 4, I think playmobil is a still a bit too fiddly for her.

And she doesn't like Sylvanian families at all. She's just not into animals. Loves dollies of all kinds though.

It just goes to show how different children are!

Those Black Crayola Colour Wonder sheets - Mess-free my arse! If you have resourceful dc like mine, they will realise that if you run them under the tap - all the black coating comes off. And pours onto your hallway carpet. To stain forever more. Even if you hire an industrial carpet cleaner. .

Bloody hama beads. Plastic pirate ship from Argos - falls to bits and never stays together. The click-clack caterpillar from ELC - Bought for DS2, lasted approximately 3 seconds before disintegrating. I also note they are still selling it. I shan't be buying one for DS3!

Moonsand. Just don't !

Oh - and the Ben 10 creation chambers - as IF the bits aren't small enough, they split them into 1000 tinier bits that enjoy embedding themselves in your feet, and also after the first day, you can never find all the bits to build one particular alien, so you end up with Vilgax's arm on Swampfire's body!

Oh Marne really? I'm sure I read on the Lego website that they were - something about growing with the child.....

moonsand and zubber for me - kids love it but truly hateful stuff

best buys would be sylvanian familys, expensive but well played with for years.

Actually the dolls house does get played with now she's older, but with playmobile people and props. Sometimes it's a house, a school, a hospital or a vet.
As she's got older the detail of the Playmobil appeals and the sets mix and match.

moonsand... after one play (we were bought it and I didn't know what I was in for...) it got everywhere. I was glad it was being played with on a tiled floor. But it still got onto the carpets.

After a lot of hoovering it was just about out of everything, then the remaining sand was stuffed in ziplocs and removed...

Playdoh works well with the moonsand moulds, for those not hating PD as well!

I like lego - but one does have to enforce jail sentences on any pieces trodden on. We also jail tins of it if not put away upon request...

I dearly wish we'd not go so many 'educational' jigsaw cards, which have numbers and letters on each half. Great idea with one small flaw. They get dropped and a pile of them is intensely slippery. And then they fly everywhere...

Oh and plasticine. I had this rose-tinted memory of playing with it as a child so I got some for DS.

The reality of trying to get the bastard stuff out of the carpet was enough to open my eyes!

Old Happyland is great, new Happyland is cheap shite the doors break off of in two seconds. I'd rather buy second hand.

Remote Control Daleks
Anything that doesn't go with stuff we already have. I have affinitised storage boxes with photos on - I cannot be arsed redoing that

We've got both Duplo and Lego and you can fit them together, I've done it!

Thank you flipflop, I googled and they are definitely supposed to. Duplo are exactly twice the size of lego or some such.....

Hopefully it will work out!

I mostly agree about the peppa pig playsets, however the figures are one of the most played with things in our house. Someone gave me the peppa pig house when dd1 was two and she played with it every day!

Whats wrong with zhu zhu hamsters? Ive just bought some for ds2s Christmas. Are they rubbish and break easily or just annoying.

i agree with most of the suggestions already especially sodding moonsand and hotwheels tracks and anything with voice recognition aaaarrrrrrrrggghh. (another central Scotland accent here, maybe its programmed not to recognise us).

zhu zhu hamsters eat carpet and then die.

lol i read it wrong , i thought it meant people were breaking them on purpose lol. Do the zhuzhu hamsters work on wooden floors then (please say yes)

Happy Land, doors fall off everything with doors within minutes + their customer service is rubbish.

Hot Wheels - takes ages to set up and is rubbish.

Any tv/film character branded stuff is just crap.

Any 'make your own' kits, just a lot of wasted time.

Barbies = overpriced crap.