Editor’s picks: The products that will help your baby reach their milestones.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed in myself parenting my first child and my second child is this;

With my first child, the development, the next stage, the next party trick, crawling, walking, talking, it couldn’t happen fast enough. He would do one thing, and I’d be happy for about a week before the urge and the anticipation for him to get to the next step would start again.

With my second, I’m silently shouting, “SLOW DOWN, BABY,” inside my head. She’s 15 months now; about to start walking, nearly close to talking and my heart is breaking. I want to hold onto these moments of babyhood for as long as possible. I want to soak her up, hold her infancy in my soul to replace the regret I feel that I didn’t enjoy my first for the short time that he was a baby.

Is this the greatest paradox of motherhood? It can't happen too fast all the while, it's happening way too quickly.

Ah well. Either way, development marches on, relentlessly, inevitably. Ultimately, it's to be encouraged, despite my wish to hold my baby in my arms for just a moment longer.

Here are my picks for toys to help your child develop (once you've come to grips with it, I guess).

Fisher-Price Learn with Me Zebra Walker.

Learning to walk - that's the achievement we seem to celebrate the most. The Fisher Price Learn with Me Zebra Walker is a great walker to help baby take those first few tentative steps. And like most Fisher Price toys, this Walker is layered up with multiple features for broad learning.

Baby can turn the book page, press light up buttons, it plays songs, ABC's and 123's. It plays lots of fun phrases, music and songs, which invite and reward even more moving and grooving, helping little ones get even steadier on their feet.

'Dear Zoo' and 'Buster's Zoo', by Rod Campbell.

There's heaps of stuff parents can do to help their kids get a great start, you know that. I know that. One of the easiest and the best is to read to your children from the earliest of ages.

My eldest child adored the book, Dear Zoo, by Rod Campbell. It's a lovely lift-the-flap book, with a cute story about a boy who asks the zoo to send him a pet. He enjoyed it so much he tried to eat it at about nine months old. Sadly, Dear Zoo had to go in the bin shortly after.

His second favourite book was 'Buster's Zoo', a touch and feel book about - you guessed it - Buster's visit to the zoo. I'm happy to report that Buster's Zoo survived my son's baby years and is now in the process of being eaten by my daughter.

Duplo.

I have been known to joke that duplo was the reason I had children. Only problem is, that's not really a joke. I LOVE DUPLO. So there's that, but it's also worth considering the fact that the capacity to stack blocks one on top of another is used to measure development in children. Duplo helps develop this skill, and you can have fun too.

The Learning Journey My First Puzzle pack.

The Learning Journey make fantastic puzzle sets. They're bright and colourful, and come in all sorts of themes (we're pretty into dinosaurs in our house, so this one is for us.) Puzzles are great for learning sorting and pattern recognition.

A dolly.

Bear with me here. My son has a dolly. He has a dolly for a couple of really good reasons. Firstly, when I was pregnant with my daughter, a doll was a really great tool to use to explain what was going to happen and what a baby looks like.

Secondly, there have been a couple of times when my son has come out with some surprisingly sexist statements. He's four. He's not a sexist. He's simply picking up on some deeply ingrained societal gender norms. I hope that gently guiding him with things like toys can help him understand the world a little differently. It's also the reason I give my daughter trucks to play with. I'm not sure how all that will go ultimately, but I have high hopes.

Melissa and Doug Pattern Blocks and Boards.

This is such a beautiful, classic toy set - it's so nice I almost don't mind when my son scatters his set across the living room. They're a great toy for developing fine motor skills as well as pattern recognition in older kids.

Do your children own any of these? How have they helped their development?