Twenty minutes of co-operation (featuring a review)

One of the things I'm really enjoying about S and A at the moment is watching them interract.  It's not always good interraction: the journey to my parents' last week (while, please note, they should, in any event, have been asleep) was spent with one of them putting her hand on the other's car seat, and the other going ballistic at the encroachment on her territory.  A brief bout of arm wrestling would ensue, before the roles were reversed. 

Would have been funny if it hadn't been so noisy.  Actually, scratch that, it was funny...  Today's behaviour, on the other hand, was less so...

But, for better or worse, they're very into doing things together at the moment, and, mostly, it's lovely to see.

I was watching them, the other day, with a Stacking Tree which I had been sent by Hello Baby Direct.  Now, I didn't know this website before, and there are bits of it (well one bit of it) that I think is awful.  It describes itself as "the website for parents who care", which is the sort of thing that is absolutely guaranteed to make me angry.  It implies that if you don't buy things from their website, then you don't care, and quite frankly parents are given enough to beat themselves up about already without online toy shops getting in on the action.  It's exactly the same when you're expecting a baby ("well, you could get the cheaper car seat (which, please note, meets all safety standards), but, really, for the baby's sake..." (sub-text: "if you really loved your baby...").

So, had I happened upon the website, I'd have sworn at the computer and clicked away.  As it is, they sent me something nice, so I had to have a proper look, and I'm glad I did, because not only have they got some really nice stuff, but they actually realise that parents care about more than just their own child.  So they give you the background on the manufacturers and processes that go into the making of the toys, so that you can make decisions based on that too.

Anyway, back to the toy and the babies.

They showed each other what to do:

 

They took it in turns:

 

And they cheered and clapped each other when they (jointly) got it right:

And, most importantly, they spent a good twenty minutes playing together without so much as a push or a whinge.

So thank you Hello Baby, and thank you Stacking Tree.  You made my month.  I'll be getting it out again tomorrow after the day I've had....