toys (even a potato, even a soda bottle)

Pretty sure my heart just broke. 

ingenuity and inventiveness, of course, but you can't call this "upcycling."  
but it does speak to the need for toys, which is a very, very, very old need indeed (there is archaeological and other evidence for pull toys and dolls going back thousands of years).

In Juliana Ewing's "Land of Lost Toys," there is a very brief passage about a toy that is respected and revered by the others for how much it was loved: a potato, the "doll" of a poor Irish child, a toy the child clung to even through starvation and death.