Have you ever used liquid water color paint? I know that liquid water sounds like an oxymoron, but this stuff is more like water than paint. A little goes a long way, and you can even dilute it to make it last even longer. Sy’s art teacher busted this stuff out the other day and the kids geeked out. She diluted the (very bright) paint, and then gave them those little bingo marker bottles as well as eye droppers. We got to play with it on a color diffusing paper (it has a higher cotton count so it diffuses the liquid beautifully) and the paintings turn out more like tie-dyed shirts than water color. They are so nifty! We have ours hanging in the window and they look like little stained glass masterpieces.
I highly recommend this for your budding artist. P.S., most of the links above are to Discount School Supply, the online purveyor of pretty much every art item you could ever think of for your little one. Sy’s art teacher gets her supplies there; I have never purchased from them but I do trust her opinion! She said that she has a harder time finding the color diffusing paper in regular sheets, as a lot of places only sell them in pre-cut shapes these days.
Check out this groovy tube of five containers of eco modeling dough from Eco Kids - handmade in the USA with 100% plant-based coloring. This safe modeling dough contains no chemicals, no artificial dyes and no heavy metals. It is safe enough to eat but not tasty so kids won’t try again!
Each 4 oz container is made from 100% post consumer recycled plastic and the tube is made from 100% post consumer waste. This dough doesn’t dry out like many name brands. If left out overnight, just add a few drops of olive oil and it comes right back! Bonus: you can compost it when you are done! Comes in green, yellow, orange, pink, and blue. You can add a bamboo rolling pin for just four more bucks. Suggested age: 18 months+
I like that the sellers, peek a green, even give us a list of ingredients: flour, salt, cream of tartar, vitamen E oil, organic rosemary oil, sodium benzoate, potassium sorbate, citric acid and fruit, plant and vegetable extracts from beets, spinach, paprika, carrots, purple sweet potato, red cabbage, blueberries and tomatoes.
Happy Eco-Shopping!
Santa only brings one gift per kid in our house, and he’s giving Baby G (and by default, his big sister) a big ol’ cardboard house. Imagination Box Co. makes groovy box houses that your little critters can gleefully deface with markers, crayons, paint, glitter, you name it. It ships flat, comes with a set of water colors and is only $24.95. You can order an extra set of paints for two bucks! Shipping is between about $8.00 and $20.00, depending on how fast you need it. Christmas is fast approaching, but Hanukkah starts on Friday. Giddyup!
Some Christmas years are about the Big Reveal: the Santa Set-Up that requires an All-Nighter reminiscent of college. Pretty sure the Kitchen falls into that category. My dad used to watch the Pope address his people while assembling toys for his five kids into the wee hours, according to my mom.
This year, for us is a ‘tweener. My girls can’t name Big Ticket Items they lust after, and we’re not so sad about it. That means they’ll receive a few small items, or the upgrades to already-haves. Our three-year-old will be the lucky recipient of a toy in the latter category: The Daisy Greenway Interactive Camper. The Camper is affiliated with the Mrs. Goodbee Dollhouse, which we reviewed earlier this year, and which has gotten more play in this house than…(avoiding joke invoking frat boys) any other toy this year among the three-to-four-year-olds. It helps that the dollhouse opens in a tri-fold, inviting friends to play on both sides. I can only assume that the Camper is similarly accessible. But it doesn’t really matter: this gift affords us the opportunity to set up both the dollhouse and Camper Santa-style: with all the accessories set up like a window display, ready to play with and begging for a kids’ admiration for attention to detail.
If you have a three-year-old and no dollhouse on site: Go Goodbee, with accompanying accessory sets. Your child won’t be disappointed.
Note: Amazon has this Camper toy listed for $50ish…but it’s cheaper at Target (I couldn’t find it online, but I got it at the store no problem).
Our friends at I Can Do That! games are offering a lovely 40% off rebate for their Curious George games through Sunday, October 4th. We have the Curious George Hide and Seek Zoo game and my 4 year old truly loves it. We play it probably four days a week.
Click here to download the rebate form. Thanks, ICDT!
[Ed. Note: My friend Heidi is taking over the writing reins today. Heidi is a mom of two fabulous creatures, aged almost four and eight and a half. Thanks, Heidi! Welcome to the GHM gang.]
I don’t know about any of you, but I was so glad when my daughter, Camille, finally bid adieu to My Little Pony. All those little ponies (it seemed like we had 200) and the endless hours of Pony land that we had to enact drove me nuts. I couldn’t take one more minute of Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie or Minty, so it was with great joy when, at about age five, she said “Goodbye, Pinkie Pie” and “Hello, Fairies!” The fairy obsession, which for some reason seems kind of organic & wholesome is still going strong at eight and a half years old. I have to check myself here and realize that anything would seem more organic than a pastel green plastic pony. Anyway, there are many, many fantastic fairy toys out there, but these Fairy in a Box are one of the best.
Since Sy is allergic to dust mites, I try to avoid getting her yet another stuffed rabbit for her Easter basket. This year I picked up the awesome Indoor Gardening Kit from Green Toys for both Sy and her seven year old cousin. We have the tea set and it’s one of Sy’s favorite toys. It’s one of my favorite toys because a) it doesn’t make any noise and b) it’s made out of recycled milk jugs.
I’ll review them both after Sy gets the gardening kit.
Ed. Note: My kids are still so sick. Blech. Thankfully my sister saved the day yet again. Thanks for the review, sissy!
My daughter T started spontaneously speaking in an Australian accent last night at bedtime. “Hey Mawm…I’d rAlly like to go to AusTawliaa,” she tells me, at 8:45pm. Since, to my knowledge, she’s never met anyone from Down Under, this surprised me. “Are you studying Australia in school?” I ask naively. ‘No, Mom” (‘duh’ was implied), “I learned about it on Fetch!”
I should have known. SO many exchanges like this are answered that same way. The PBS television show Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman seems to be contributing way more to my daughter’s education than anything else. Does this mean I’m a bad mother?
We don’t watch a lot of television. I swear. My daughter is actually conflict adverse so very early we were turning off Mr. Rogers anytime he sent the trolley into the Land of Make Believe (way too much conflict in the world of Daniel Tiger). But Fetch, Fetch is cool.
First in a series of Post-Holiday Round-up: Lame or Game? is the chronicle of one gift with promise that didn’t deliver.
As far as holiday disappointments go, let’s begin with the GeoTrax GeoAir Mega Set, which my mom bought for her Grandparents’ Cache of Cool Stuff. This toy looks undeniably cool in the box, in the store. One has only to begin assembly to realize that while it may be cool for kids, it could cause parents to overheat.
Ed. Note: And here we have the fourth installment from sister-ville. Thanks again, G - you can write here anytime!
It started with Ruby the Red Fairy. A simple little book, cute little fairy girl on the front cover, bright colors (I’m a sucker for bright book covers). My daughter brought it home in kindergarten as an introductory chapter reader. I was proud. She was proud. She read it aloud to me. We both enjoyed the adventures of Rachel and Kirsty as they raced to help fairy Ruby find her way back to her magical fairy world.
Then the next book came home. Ruby’s rainbow sister Amber the Orange Fairy had to be rescued. Then came Sunny the Yellow Fairy (this book was evidently published under two different titles…some libraries have it as Saffron the Yellow Fairy), then Fern the Green Fairy and on and on and on and on.
Ed. Note: Here’s part three of my sister’s four part review series. Thanks, sis!
My daughter and I have very different opinions of the Zizzle Spotz Creator. She thinks it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and has spent hours and hours playing with it. I think it is a relentless conspiracy plot to bankrupt well-meaning parents and to fill the world with lots of little plastic pieces. We’ve agreed to disagree.
That T loves the product is, of course, a good thing as self-directed craft-play is always welcome. On the surface, the Spotz Creator seems promising. The central ‘Creator’ console is made of strong extruded plastic in bright kid-centric colors and has smooth edges. The gears are big, the punch simple and the concept clear: put the parts into the obvious places, punch down, get Spotz (a little plastic ring with paper inside). You color/draw on the paper (it comes with translucent paper with little printed pictures to color and with blank sheets in case you want to design your own), cut it out square, put it in the top punch machine, line up the little plastic rings with the little plastic covers, push down, and PRESTO, you have a Spotz of your own making.
Ed. Note: Here’s another gem from my sister. Keep it coming, G!
The outside of the packages says that Knot-A-Quilt kits are for children 6 and older. I guess at 41 I can still qualify under ‘older’, right? Made by ALEX toys, a company that seeks to provide quality creative products, this kit has far surpassed my expectations for ease of use, quality, and sheer entertainment value.
We went looking for the kit to diffuse an on-going problem. My 7-year old daughter T always wants to knit with me. I love that she wants to be with me, I love that she wants to knit and have dreams of us knitting together. But at 7, knitting is still too hard. So every time I bring out my knitting we have a problem. She simply isn’t developmentally ready to knit without tears. But now, now we have been saved by knots.
The thing that Knot-a-Quilt gets right is that it isn’t too easy but it isn’t too precise either.
Ed. Note: This just in from my sister, Gwen. Her daughter is seven, so we’ll get a good round of older kiddo toys reviewed post-Christmas. Thanks, sistah!
I’m usually right about the toys T is going to like. I was wrong about Magformers. She likes things with personality (little creatures, storybook figures, etc.), things that torture parents (like Polly Pockets), or things that are crafty. She is not into building things like Magformers by Rainbow Products. We don’t do Legos or blocks (and never have, much to my husband’s dismay). So when I saw the Magformers unwrapped in the holiday crush I was lock-solid certain it would be a miss.
Boy was I wrong.
Ed. Note: Here’s Jenna’s second post. Thanks, Jenna and feel free to stop by and post any old time!
Although not everyone in my house who would agree, my kids do not need any more toys. I suspected even they realized this when the pair of them—at the tender ages of 3 and 5—both put “a new toothbrush” (unprompted) on their respective Christmas lists. I mean, if that’s not scraping the bottom of the wish- bucket, I don’t know what is.
So it was with great trepidation that I eyed the poor mail carrier every day during the endless month of December as he struggled up the front path under a towering stack of boxes. Obviously, my children’s seven hundred aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and a global smattering of honorary relatives were fully unaware of their severe lack of need—and our growing shortage of storage space. Toys R Us, indeed.
I had gently requested (not altogether accurate) early in the season, via mass email, that if any of our nearest did feel compelled to express their affection for my daughters with a physical token, that it pretty pretty please be a) small, b) educational, c) something I could re-gift or sell on eBay (ideally for a profit), or d) some combination of the above. Cash, I may have added in what I hoped was a subtle post script, was always welcome and no longer considered gauche.
Puzzles and picture books, baby dolls and bath robes, gadgets and games piled up with reckless abandon. A few of them got a little play before they were tossed into the sub-tree abyss, but for a while there was no clear stand-out.
And then we tore into the Shrink Art Jewelry Kit by Klutz. An updated take on the Shrinky Dinks my sister and I loved as a kid, this kit kept the kids (okay, and me—but it was by choice) busy for hours.
Seattle-based I Can Do That! Games™ was founded by Jacobe Chrisman, formerly Cranium’s head of product development, responsible for many of that company’s award-winning games for children. The team at I Can Do That! Games believes that “play is essential for the development of happy, healthy kids. Playing games is all about experiencing play with others. Taking turns, teaming up, helping each other, winning, and even sometimes losing are important life lessons we practice as we play games.” I couldn’t agree more. So when they asked Sy and I to review a new game on the scene, we gladly took on the request.
I Can Do That! Games uses well-known Dr. Seuss characters in all of their games, a bonus for me because like most of you, Dr. Seuss and I go way back. And since I am the one playing the game with Sy, it’s nice to be surrounded with old friends such as Horton, the Grinch or the goat from Green Eggs and Ham. Green Eggs and Ham - Busy Diner was the obvious choice for us since Sy is so obsessed with cooking, cooking shows, playing chef, and generally leaving all play food items under the coffee table (her “refrigator”).
