Favorite Household Toys

Your cat doesn't always need fancy store-bought toys.  A lot of times, simple household objects work just fine and sometimes are even preferred over "real" toys!  Carbon loves bottle caps, for example.  After we adopted him and Tabby as kittens, my husband couldn't figure out where the bottle caps he was saving on the counter (ones that had prize codes for free pop) were going.  They were disappearing, but there was no trace of them at all!  Then, one day, we caught baby kitten Carbon, six weeks old at the time, on top of the kitchen counter with a green cap in his mouth!  He looked at us, then hopped down with the cap, set it on the floor, and started batting it all around the kitchen happily.  Of course, we let him keep it!

Rori just brought me five of her "babies" that she dug out of the bathroom garbage can, chirping at me and at them.  Her choice for "babies" are q-tips!  She carries them around, decorates the house with them, then bites one of the ends off and swallows it.  Not the best idea, so we pick them up when we can, and usually put used ones in the fireplace rather than in the garbage so she can't get to them in the first place.

Tabby's choice is the cardboard tube left over from a toilet paper roll.  Once she sees one of those, she asks you to throw it for her, then goes absolutely nuts batting it all around the whole house.  She pounces on it, chases it up and down the hallway, carries it into a room then bats it out to the hallway again, and growls at it in a mock battle.

What are your cat's favorite household "toys"?