Kat with a K

Personalized Gift Guide: 5-Year-Old Girl

I offered to come up with gift suggestions for your hard-to-buy-for friends and relatives, and a friend has taken me up on the offer! I'm not going to name/link her just in case her kids are wily enough to find this. Knowing (of) her kids, it wouldn't surprise me. (Note: This friend is Canadian, so I've used Canadian links and prices where possible.)

The recipient: Her 5-year-old daughter
Likes: World domination, baking, and stuffed animals
Challenges: The child has two older siblings, so the family already has "every toy in the world."

So, trying to avoid actual toys . . .

A baking book: Amazon.ca has Sara Lewis's Kids' Baking and Linda Collister's Baking with Kids. Oh, and Cakes for Kids looks fun. Wait, I just remembered that this child is also gluten-free, so scratch those cookbook ideas for her, but I'll leave them up here for others who might be interested. I don't see any gluten-free cookbooks designed for kids to use themselves, but, you know, someone should get on that. There's certainly a market.

Cookie cutters: Fun and (reasonably) practical! I have a set of 100 I got for $20 at a craft store, and they cover all seasons, letters, sports, etc. They're plastic, which would be easier for kids to handle. Here are animals and letters and numbers.

Other baking paraphernalia: There are some kids' baking sets, but they don't look that great. I'd go right to adult stuff - maybe some of the brightly-colored silicon stuff if you like that sort of thing - and look for fun shapes - I've seen cake pans in the shape of animals, Christmas themes, etc. Along these lines, or these. Or, oh!

How about a cupcake kit? Get her her very own cupcake pans, paper liners, some little jars of sprinkles and other decorations, and a cupcake stand on which to display her creations. For a child not on a special diet, you could also throw in one of the multitude of adorable cupcake cookbooks out there.

World domination needs maps, right? Here's a magnetic map game that looks fun. And there are lots of great map puzzles out there, like this one. A globe - ooh, or a globe ball - might be fun too.

Any budding world dictator needs a fun coin bank to save her pennies to finance the revolution, right? This one has some sort of magic art and makes your coins disappear. Or Paint Your Own Piggy Bank! And I was looking for some sort of coin sorter but couldn't find one. Hmm.

Books! Books are always good, but I have no idea what she or her siblings already have. I think this kid might find mythology fun - D'Aulaires, of course, is the best. I was trying to find a series of biographies of explorers, to stay with the world domination theme, but I keep getting Dora the Explorer results. Ooh, So You Want to Be an Explorer? looks good. I also love Klutz books - they're really well-made activity and craft books with kits.

Craft kits, actually, are good for when you have too many toys, because theoretically they're consumable and don't just sit around, and at least they're an active, creative thing rather than another piece of plastic. And this girl has a crafty big sister, so maybe having some of her own stuff helps keep the little one out of the big sister's stash? One can hope. (Not that I'm suggesting that these children are anything but perfectly behaved at all times. Totally just extrapolating from my own experience here.) I love the Creativity for Kids brand, and it looks like they're available in Canada.

Since she likes stuffed animals, suggesting more stuffed animals probably isn't helpful. But how about somewhere for the stuffed animals to live? I had an open-topped toy box just for my stuffed animals, and that was nice.

I know they have a Nintendo Wii. How about Where's Waldo? or Just Dance Kids or Playmobil Circus? And as a bonus, I think they should get Epic Mickey as a joint gift for the whole family, because it looks awesome but I have no Wii, so someone should get it and play it on my behalf.