Toys for summer fun and travel ~ a B. toys review

Buckets, and doodles, and balls, oh my! Summer is coming and B. toys just sent me some great new toys at no charge to introduce to you!

Do some toys just feel more like summer to you? I think these toys do, and they will keep my kids busy and active all summer long.

For traveling fun, I love the H2-Whoa – it’s a drawing board kids write on with plain water. The patented fabric holds the liquid for a few seconds while kids draw. Four water pens tuck into the sides of the board and allow for thin and thick lines.

There’s a purple side and an orange side – my opinion is the drawing shows up best on purple. While it’s nice that the water dries to create a freshly blank drawing surface (no need to use up paper!), I wish the water didn’t dry quite so fast – for my three year old, it dries a bit too quickly for him to finish his drawing before the first part is gone. But he’ll just have to get faster on the draw, I suppose! (couldn’t help it!). H2-Whoa is a great doodle-board for the car or at home this summer! There’s no worry about crayons or markers on the couch!

Our boys have been having a blast with the other two B. toys we were sent as well:

Ballyhoo is a large ball with 5 little balls that fit into the sides. When they bounce or roll the ball, it goes all “kooky,” rolling this way and that. You never know which way it will bounce next (or which little ball might pop out at them!). Mostly, though, the boys just like to take all the balls out and play some variety of bowling with them. All the balls have interesting textures on them that our baby loves to touch! (Parents’ Choice Recommended Award Winner).

Bazillion Buckets is such a simple toy but keeps our kids busy for a long time. Our oldest loves to stack the 10 buckets up high (they are so beautifully printed with bright patterns)! It’s fun to stack them small to big or vice versa. The baby just loves looking inside each one to see if there’s a little treat or something hiding for him! The largest bucket has a handle, so when you pack them all up, you can carry the buckets away to the beach, bathtub, sandbox… Besides stacking, they are great for sorting out items because they are a variety of sizes. Or you could invent a game with a lot of children… there’s so many ideas I have for these buckets!! They are also BPA-free, lead-free, phthalate-free!

Both the Ballyhoo and Bazillion Buckets, I have found, are great toys for the boys to play with together – cooperative play is something I’ve been working on promoting between the siblings!

I’ve long been a fan of B. toys, for their innovative take on children’s classics (like the Parum musical set), as well as introducing a wide variety of new toys…and their signature fun colors are a refreshing change from primary colors! You can browse B. toys (where you’ll find a lot of other fun info like B. Quotes and B. Log).

Thanks to B. toys for sending items for review. All opinions are 100% my own.