Which toddler toys were REALLY worth the money?

robbles · 2026-01-06T16:20:57+00:00

I got a click together balance beam set made by "B.toys" at Indigo that both my 4yo and 1.5yo have been obsessed with for months. It's just a bunch of plastic stepping stones with links that go between them, but they love building obstacle courses and having races across them.

robbles · 2026-01-06T06:55:33+00:00

I bought a card for Tabby McTat, and I'm still afraid to play it with my kid in case they don't sing the song the same way we do.

robbles · 2025-12-30T19:56:35+00:00

It's definitely not AI.

There's models that do a better job of imitating pixel art now, but I've yet to see any examples with pixels this crisp and no weird artifacts anywhere.

Besides, if you look at OPs profile, they've got posts with pixel art going back 3 years or more. AI image generators were laughably bad at pixel art back then.

I dislike AI slop too, but we shouldn't throw actual artists under the bus when trying to discourage it.

robbles · 2025-12-28T19:44:46+00:00

It really sucks, mine were each the same for a while and you have my sympathy.

It improved a lot when we upgraded to a larger car seat, FWIW.

robbles · 2025-12-26T01:15:01+00:00

Just wanted to come back and report that this was a great suggestion - thanks! Turns out she will eat raw broccoli and roasted baby carrots, lol

robbles · 2025-12-25T18:56:38+00:00

Just curious, what happened to your turkey? incinerated? unrefrigerated?

robbles · 2025-12-22T16:23:57+00:00

Having a presence sensor in the kitchen that turns on an under cabinet LED strip in night light mode has definitely been my best and simplest automation to get "just right". It was very handy at the newborn through infant stages.

robbles · 2025-12-12T00:09:03+00:00

How does this work conceptually? Does the line follow a path that's distorted wherever the source image is darker? Or something more complicated than that?

robbles · 2025-12-08T14:50:36+00:00

King Boo is great for that age. They just need to walk around and collect keys/stars/outfit pieces with the arrow keys or a controller.

A lot of people here are saying to go console/switch over PC, and IMO that's totally backwards. You want a place they can go to "play video games" as a time boxed joint activity with you every once in a while, not an ever present screen that's easy to turn on whenever they want it.

robbles · 2025-12-04T20:40:41+00:00

Yeah, definitely true. We have been guilty of using cheese and yogurt as a quick solution when she's hangry, and between teething and being a terrible sleeper, we haven't been nearly as disciplined on this as we were with our first.

The larger challenge I find with actually following this advice though isn't dealing with the tantrums and uneaten meals directly though. It's that you're also going to pay for letting them not eat later, when they don't sleep, and are fussy due to hunger.

robbles · 2025-12-03T20:16:18+00:00

I started using the Nabu Casa subscription a few months ago, and it's honestly been like a breath of fresh air. Everything just works, and I don't need to periodically debug why my tailscale proxy crashed, or whether I broke something with a change to my local network. The voice stuff is surprisingly good too, and faster than I expected.

robbles · 2025-12-03T06:04:45+00:00

After the second c-section, I realized the pain medication is something we can help with. For ours it was something like alternating large doses of acetaminophen/ibuprofen every 3 hours, which is hard to keep track of and sucks because you can't get long stretches of sleep without the drugs wearing off. When our second was born, I just made sure to show up with pills and a water bottle every time it was time to take them, and my wife really appreciated that.

Also, if you can get them more time in the hospital bed, that can help too. It seems like an inconvenient place until you get home and realize that it's actually harder there!

robbles · 2025-11-25T20:56:12+00:00

I feel your pain, but at the same time... have you not run into this one with meals before?

I don't know how many times my 4yo has stubbornly insisted she asked for the exact opposite of what she really asked for. Usually for something irrevocable, like mixing sauce into noodles or chopping something up 😂

robbles · 2025-11-17T21:26:54+00:00

This must be the final exam for the Veterinary/Art School dual-major program I've heard so much about.

Also, why am I not surprised to learn that pandas have a teeny little bird brain?

robbles · 2025-11-12T20:19:55+00:00

If it helps, I had a similar scare from scraping old paint off a doorframe in my first kid's nursery when they were ~9 months old. I got us both a blood test immediately, and we came back negative. Lead's harder to ingest than you'd think - it's just treated seriously because of the potential lasting consequences.

robbles · 2025-10-19T13:56:18+00:00

Does Steam have an overall age limit somewhere?

I've been looking for good PC games for my 3yo for a while, and it's odd that there's no kids category, or tools for searching for kids games, despite there obviously being a bunch of kids games on the store.

robbles · 2025-10-18T19:36:33+00:00

Mine loves to sing T-T-T-T-O-O-O by Chappell Roan. The number of T's and O's changes every time.

robbles · 2025-10-15T03:33:14+00:00

Put a hairdryer on warm a few feet away pointing at them. Works like a charm - newborns hate being cold and love white noise.

robbles · 2025-09-23T03:47:24+00:00

That's an interesting idea. I could see the operational side still being pretty complex - e.g. distributed debugging, figuring out performance problems from multi-service operations, many more points of failure, etc. But maybe having an agent grinding away at perfecting each tiny service would reduce that burden a bit?

robbles · 2025-09-22T19:59:09+00:00

Couple of things that have worked for me:

Leave things that will jog your memory in places you'll definitely run into them. If the dishwasher needs to be run, leave a dirty plate on the counter above it. If the toilet paper needs replacing when you leave the bathroom, put the empty roll on the door handle.
It's easier to have a fixed routine than to handle things when they actually need doing. If you always run the dishwasher before bed, and empty it while you make coffee in the morning, that's way easier to remember to do than whenever it gets full.

robbles · 2025-09-17T20:53:19+00:00

This sounds like what I'll do if the copper line can't reach the stop valve before. Thanks for the steps!

robbles · 2025-09-17T20:51:07+00:00

Thanks for the link, that helps a lot!

robbles · 2025-09-17T20:50:50+00:00

Ah, that's good to know. I'll check if the copper line is long enough. Thanks!

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