I've Put 4 Things on My Kitchen Counter for Guests' Kids. Only One Never Went Back in the Drawer.
If you read about Ollie and the block he wouldn't give back, this is that block. Let me save you the drawer full of things I tried first.
A jigsaw puzzle. A tub of modeling dough. A fidget spinner a guest left behind. Every one of them got about an afternoon. The puzzle was missing pieces by day two.
Three things in the drawer. One on the counter.
TL;DR: It's the Boulder Block. A solid wooden block with 12 real climbing holds and a deck of 32 routes. You climb it with your fingers, hold to hold. In my kitchen, it's in a child's hand within the hour.
1It's in a child's hand within the hour
Sporty kids, quiet kids, the ones who came to the mountains under protest. Under about 12, if that block is on the table, somebody is holding it, and there's usually an argument about whose turn it is.
2I put it out for the adults. I was wrong.
I left it there for the climbers, honestly, with the card next to it as a dare. The grown-ups tried it once. The children never put it down.
3What's actually in the box
A solid wooden block. 12 real resin climbing holds that unscrew and move, so the routes never run out. A deck of 32 routes in 4 levels, from Yellow (easy) to Purple (expert). One Allen wrench, about 2 minutes to set up.
4What it won't do
It doesn't teach a child to tie a lace. It won't fix handwriting on its own. Anybody who tells you a wooden toy will do that is not being straight with you.
What it does is give a child's hands something difficult and interesting to do, in 32 steps, for as long as they want. And they want to.
5Why it beats the tablet on the tablet's own terms
Anything you have to make a child do, you have to make them do forever. This one they choose, because there's a hardest route on it they can't do yet. It's a game with a top, and a brother or sister who might get there first.
Mick says it's the same reason the climbing wall works on kids nothing else works on: "It isn't exercise. It's a problem with a summit, at a size a child can hold."
6The only test I'd trust
Put it on the table and say nothing at all. Don't explain it, don't make it an activity. If nobody has picked it up within a day, it isn't for your house, and you send it back.
Every parent I've watched try this in my kitchen has had the opposite problem: taking it off somebody at bedtime.
There's an offer on it right now. You'll see it on the next page.
If there's more than one child in your house, you already know how one block ends. One family here used a kitchen timer.
Whatever their hands are going to be, they're being built right now, this year, while everybody's busy.
They'll never know it happened. That's the whole point.
— Bea