When the next birthday rolls around, consider skipping the toy aisle. Unconventional gifts can turn into valued treasures. A cuckoo clock seems like magic to a child. An old blanket chest makes a great toy chest, and it can grace your child’s living room when they’re older. And hunting for that treasure with your spouse, in a junk store on the side of a highway, at a yard sale, or in a city antique mall, can make birthday shopping an adventure and a pleasure.

The sheep painting wasn’t intended to be a first birthday present. At an estate sale, the painting reminded me of the wry looking sheep in Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable Kingdom.” I have a thing for sheep, and they came home with me.

Ostensibly, I planned to resell the painting. I propped it on the mantle to enjoy it until then. But later that evening, as I was carrying MG across the living room, she pointed at the painting and said “BAAAAAAAA.” At that moment, it became hers.

On her first birthday we moved it to the floor of her room, propped it against the wall, and daily she crawled up to it, pointing, cawing “BAAAAAAAA.”

When we read nursery rhymes about sheep, she visits the sheep.

We sing “Ba Ba Black Sheep” to the sole black sheep.

We practice counting the ten sheep.

There’s nothing intrinsically valuable about the painting. It’s mid-nineteenth century, to judge by its frame. It’s unsigned. It cost about the same as the wooden walker we got as her other first birthday present. But it’s a present we think she’ll keep, and after she hauls it to a dorm room, to her first apartment, and eventually gives it to her child or grandchild, it will officially take on heirloom status.

When they’re painted by unknowns, or are unsigned, it’s surprising how affordable old paintings can be. And it doesn’t matter if it’s worth anything. If it makes you happy, adopt it. Giving a child an object with some history an easy way to foster an interest in the past, and to stimulate them visually and intellectually. And if it’s one of your child’s original possessions, it will become so valuable to them they wouldn’t even sell it even if Antiques Roadshow said you’d struck it rich after all.

There’s no reason to limit gifts to "kids' stuff." Try giving your child something of long-term worth. Even if the value is minimal, the act of giving it will make it matter. There are other sheep, or pigs, or fruit, or flowers, out there, waiting to be taken home.