So, I know that I shouldn’t be on my phone as much in front of my toddler but… I do look at my phone. And she wants one. Lately she’d been playing with a pack of gum and pretending that it’s a phone, and I thought… what if I made her one instead?

I got to sketching in my notebook, then eventually on my computer, to come up with a concept for a laser-cuttable baby phone that kind of felt like a tape recorder, where you could insert different “screens” depending on what she wanted to do on the phone. Yes, reader, I invented apps.

The shape came out like this, ultimately:

The leftmost rounded rectangle is the “back” of the phone, the middle one is the top layer, a “window” of sorts, and then the rightmost is the middle layer, where the “U” shape would be glued between the other two layers, and the fat “T” shape would be the screen that I could slide in and out. I made the phone to be 4 inches by 2.5 inches, which would fit in a little toddler hand, but not too small for an adult one (pretty sure I had some old phones in the mid-2000s that were smaller than that).

With these shapes in mind, I could then focus on just designing different “app” screens. The ones I use in front of her the most are video calls, texting, and watching videos.

It was really fun doodling these and customizing them to what she likes.

• The video call is with a set of potatoes because I made her a Snapchat-potato-filter video once that she thought was hilarious, so naturally video calling potatoes would be funny.
• The video frame one is of some camping stuff, because she thinks campfires are fascinating and always asks to see Daniel Tiger camping and cooking outside.
• The texting one has the texting conversation say “I love you” in the three languages we’re teaching her, English, Korean, and Spanish!

You might notice the colors of the drawings and shapes. After laser cutting enough times, I’ve learned how to optimize my own files so I always make black lines to be my “cutting” lines, blue to be my engraving shapes, and red to be my “scoring” (or tracing) lines (basically a thin engraving where the laser follows the path rather than going layer by layer).

After making these… I realized I had a whole lot more space on my sheet of wood, enough to make two phones and a whopping 10 screens! I ended up adding in:

• Musical notes
• The alphabet
• A tea party “game”
• A puppy “game”
• A kitten “game”
• A lock screen of numbers
• A stock market app (she likes graphs, ha)

Also, as I was prepping the file a bit more, I realized that the empty “window” frame (the middle rectangle in the first picture) could be used, so I turned that into a little “clean/not clean” indicator for our dishwasher! I also added a pretend camera and fruit logo onto the phone back so that it could feel a bit more real there, too.

And then… it was laser time! The library has a laser cutter, so after a very long ~2 hour cut and engraving session and some glue, the phones and screens were aliiiiive! I had to tweak some settings which resulted in some screens being darker than others, but my baby does not care, so I choose not to.

Here’s the final results!

This ended up being a bigger and more time-consuming project than I originally intended, but I’m really happy with how it turned out!

As an aside… literally everyone I’ve shown these phones to has said I should start a business and sell them. It could be fun! But also… sometimes I just don’t feel like capitalism-ing. Sometimes I just want to make things for the joy of making things. No hate to those people, of course. But I am content with the fact that my toddler is happy, and thus I am happy.

If you do want to make these for yourself though… maybe I could be convinced to prep a file for you, as a treat. Maybe. Ugh, so much work. It’s a maybe.

Adios!