Our bath time-themed treasure basket

In my last post, I wrote a guide to using treasure baskets and I promised I'd share with you some of our ideas for objects you might use in them. This is our first of what I'm sure will be many themed baskets. I chose to start with the familiar, and what could be more familiar than the theme of bath time?

Using bath time as a theme for a treasure basket makes it such an easy starting point, because every household probably already has most of the objects you could possibly need to make one. There are lots of possible objects that could be used for this theme. I hadn't collected everything I wanted to, but the number of objects in the basket I made was enough for Isla's first experience of exploring a treasure basket.

Here is ours:

The items we included were: a rubber duck nail brush; a wooden nail brush; two different kinds of loofahs, a toothbrush; a normal sponge and a baby sponge which goes hard when it dries; a rubber duck, a pair of exfoliating mitts and a reflective bath toy from John Lewis. All of these objects were really inexpensive, most of which we had already and the rest we purchased from Wilkinsons. He duck nail brush was purchased at a petrol station, so it just shows you that you can pick up these objects from pretty much anywhere! I always keep my eyes peeled for objects that might be useful as treasure basket items. I'm constantly on the lookout. I didn't take any pictures of Isla exploring her treasure basket, as I was supporting her as she sat. When she's a bit more stable, I'll take a few pictures and put hem up on the blog for you to see.

Isla enjoyed her first experience of using a treasure basket. She enjoyed waving the toothbrush around and was intrigued by the textures of the brushes and loofahs. If your baby isn't able to grasp objects yet, you could always take their socks off and allow them to explore and feel the objects using their feet. We tried this and Isla seemed to enjoy it.