Little Animals in Little Bags

My sister has started making gift bags out of t-shirt material.  Some of these, I return to her, and some come home with me.  I've been using the very tiny ones of these lately in my take-to-church bag. 

A tiny bag I made myself;
a tiny bag my sister made;
a stack of cards for folding into origami frogs.

We've got a lot of families with small kids in my church, and now that I'm no longer shushing and entertaining my own kids in the pews, I've been having fun bringing small what-nots to amuse various OPKs*.  My "go-to" form of amusement is to fold little jumping frogs out of paper.  I'll make those out of any paper handy -- for example, even bits of our church bulletin -- but I've discovered that business cards are optimal for "jumpiness" of the folded frogs.  My husband gifted me a box of unused blank cards that he no longer needed (he'd used them to make flash cards for studying vocabulary and chemistry), and I drew eyes on them right where the frog eyes ought to go -- these serve me well at church and in airports and such.  

[*OPK = Other People's Kids, which is an awesome form of children to play with, 

because you can give them back and then have quiet time when you're done.]

The frogs have proved to be quite amusing, but I have discovered that "Little Animals in Little Bags" is also an amazingly desirable toy.  The animal by itself, maybe.  The bag without the animal, meh. But a Little Animal in a Little Bag is a toy of obsession.

Cow twins, and an itsy bitsy cat.

Indeed, although the parents are quite particular about getting me my toys back at the end of church (because, apparently, I must need to have my own animal toys???), sometimes the kids still manage to clench the toys so devotedly that it's a week or so before I get it again.  The awesome thing is that these little toys were just clutter in my house -- leftovers from other kids or from ages-old cow obsessions.  So I don't really care if the kids take and keep the junky little plastic things.  Moreover, I happen to be exceedingly wealthy in extra t-shirt material and random bits of string, so making yet-another-tiny-bag is a matter of minutes.  

At any rate, if you are looking to amuse Very Small Human Beings, I can recommend Very Small Bags with Very Small Toys as one potential way to do so.