Tell us about some of your first toys.
My father was a building construction teacher at our local high school and was also a carpenter and woodworker. Some there were always scraps of wood around our house. He also built our house which wasn’t finished when we moved into it when I was 2 1/2 and my brother was a new born. One of our first toys was a set of wooden blocks that my parents made for us from the scraps of wood that my father salvaged from school and hio woodworking projects and the house building. He cut the shapes and sanded them as did my mother. They were squares and rectangles and triangles,rhombuses, semi-circles, and arches. Then my mother and father painted the shapes a variety of colors, usually different colors for different sides of the shapes. the rhombuses, I remember were painted different colors on the same side on the diagonal. They were a gift to my brother, baby sister and me from Santa Clause one Christmas. What a gift of love that was as my parents stayed up at night after we had gone to bed cutting, sanding, and painting the blocks of wood for our present. We got many hours of fun using those building blocks. And there were a lot of them! My parents gave us a wonderful toy.
My Life, Such As It is 
Children still like the simple toys over the very sophisticated things that are now available.