I had never heard of Discovery Toys before I became an illustrious aunt. My mom got my niece a couple of surprisingly enjoyable toys from them, toys which have either been passed down to us or purchased again for us. I always looked in stores for them and never saw them. I asked my mom and she said that she bought them from a friend who is a rep, sort of like an Avon lady. (I looked it up and you can buy them online, too.)
Anyway, we have a handful of games from Discovery Toys and they all get equal play. Sy’s favorite is definitely the Busy Bugs Learning Center.
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.
We only gave Sy a couple of presents for her birthday since she has such a huge and generous family. The first thing we got her was the Plan Toys Gas Station because the girl has always been obsessed with gas stations. Why? We don’t know, and we don’t ask. Some three year old mysteries are better left unsolved.
I thought this toy was going to be a huge hit since it’s two of her favorite things; a gas station and the world of her very vivid imagination. All those hungry cars getting filled up at her very own gas station, what’s not to love?
A lot, according to my girl and me.
When Micky threw Kara’s third birthday party, she set up a few different easy things set up for the kids to do outside. One of her little outposts was a big white sheet hung on their back fence. She left out a bunch of squirt bottles filled with (mostly) water and washable paint and let the kids go hog wild squirting paint, Jackson Pollack style all over the sheet. Since it was washable paint, the sheet was easily cleaned as were the children. Micky soaked the sheet first, I’m not sure if she soaked her daughter. Of course by the end of the party all the kids were squirting each other instead of the sheet, but that’s all part of the fun.
She got the squirt bottles at Michael’s and just used Crayola washable paint.
Daily Candy showcased this groovy little store a few weeks back. I got sucked into the Curiosity Shoppe site and got a kick out of a lot of their products. How cool is this little rope tying kit? If your kid is not a Boy Scout or a fisherperson but still wants to learn how to tie a gazillion knots, look no further. It’s only $10.00 and comes in a cool little tube.
I think this is the kind of thing that would be great to have in the “Oh we’re going to a birthday party and have no gift ready” section of your hall closet. I have no such section yet, but I do aspire to it…
My friend Nicole reminded me how seriously cute absolutely everything is over at Blabla, a mom-run company started in 2001. Blabla works with Peruvian artisans who hand-knit each and every piece of their collections.
I am completely enamored by this whale mobile. They also have some ab-fab sweaters that size up to 4T. Love that little squirrel; I can see a boy or a girl wearing that.
The line is also available online over at Oompa, one of my favorite online toy resources.
Do you remember just loving ANYthing that was personalized when you were little? I’d comb those little racks at tourist shops for iron-on patches or bicycle-sized license plates with my name. Missy just wasn’t that popular in the 70s, so I usually came up empty handed. So I was pretty stoked when I ordered Sy’s first Just For Her book, The First Adventures of Incredible You, written by Sarah Riley Hendrick and Sarah Foreman Rivers. Illustrated by Jill Dryer Bartolucci. Sarah and Sarah were mom-friends first and now business partners. Go Moms. Go!
The First Adventures of Incredible You is a completely personalized storybook surrounding childhood memories. There’s also a cool dedication page to remind your child how much they are loved. In addition to the child’s name and birth date, some meaningful things you can include in these custom children’s books are the child’s favorite sports team, neighborhood street, nearby park, favorite food (banana bread, of course), vacation spot, local Zoo, siblings/friends, grandparents, and pet. We don’t have a pet, so I put Sy’s lovie’s name instead. She loves that page the most. I love the pages with her grandmas included. I know they’ll feel extra cool when they read it to her. The pictures are brightly colored and inviting. Sy enjoys looking at her zoo page a LOT.
Sy is not a girlie-girl at all. She likes to pick her own outfits in the morning and they generally include stripes and spots and mismatched socks, sometimes with a dress on top for color. She usually looks like the pile from the bottom of the dryer, but I think it’s fabulous. The only princess she knows of is the Paper Bag one. But now, at the cusp of three, she is really getting into dress up. She clonks around in her plastic high heels and refuses to take off her “butterfly wings” that we have. They are a sad pair, those wings. Hand-me-downs like most of her girlie dress up gear, they are torn and limp, threatening to unravel at any minute.
I feel I owe it to her to get her a pair of really fluffy, girlie, pink wings for her birthday. But where to start? I grew up wearing black and listened to New Wave. I don’t know how to be a fairy princess or even where to look. So I called on Dawn from Pink With Sparkles to review her favorite fairy accoutrements for us. Her picks after the jump.
Sy is still working her way through all the cool new gear her pal Max got for his birthday. While we were there for dinner the other night, Max started preparing a fine feast for us. What’s a delicious pretend dinner without a perfectly cooked fried egg?
These little eggs are hilarious. The child-friendly (read: fairly easy to open) metal egg shells hold a fabric fried egg inside. They slide around in a play skillet just as you hope they would. The Haba site doesn’t mention what the egg is made of, but since it’s part of the Biofina line, I am assuming it is either felt or velour. It feels like a super soft fleece, it’s really nice to the touch. The egg is a bit smaller than a real life egg, but I think it fits a little better into a real life three year old’s hands better that way.
Coming in at $5.49 over at Oompa, it’s just like ordering an expensive egg for brunch.
Sy’s pal Max just turned three and she was thrilled to go over and take all his new toys for a test drive. First up: the Doctor’s Suitcase from Haba. I’ve wanted to see this toy in person since I mentioned it back in December.
Sy was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. She loves all doctor’s kits, which I find amusing since she loathes going to the doctor with all her heart. We have this little fabric one I found at Cost Plus World Market that she likes just fine, but I could tell she felt like this one was the real deal. I sat down with Sy and Max and was immediately given shot after shot, wrapped in a yellow bandage and covered in band aids.
The thing that annoys me the most about Ikea is their website. I feel like they hide half the products and the other half are available to look at, but only a quarter of those are available to purchase online. Luckily, their totally rad Mala easel is amongst the glorified few available for online purchase.
The Mala easel is like a Kenmore appliance: it’s efficient, lacks most bells and whistle, and abslutely does its job. It has a chalkboard on one side and white board on the other, and it even folds flat when not in use. You can also buy the Mala paper roll separately that you can pull over the white board side for painting or drawing.
Starting at about two months before Easter, those little plastic eggs you can find at your local mega-mart sure are fun. For some reason we only had about four left over from last year, and they didn’t really click together very well. So Roger brought home sixty three of them (But honey, it was only five dollars!) the other night for Sy. She was over the moon excited. We’ve been hiding them ever since (luckily not all sixty three). Of course, when I say that I am going to go and hide them in the other room, she giggles and then comes with me to help me hide them. It doesn’t matter, she has just as much fun collecting them whether she knows where they are or not. When it’s her turn to hide them, she takes a long time, and hides lots of other things along with the eggs, then calls for me to come find them. She then scurries around the room pointing out where all the hidden treasure lies.
Check out Design Mom’s tips for growing your own Easter grass. Oh to be that crafty. Knowing my time lines, I’d get around to it about two days before Easter and have it ready just in time for bouquets on May Day…
Like any self-respecting 2 1/2 year old, Sy is obsessed with the mail. Getting the mail, harassing our very kind postal carrier, sending the mail, checking out the mailboxes at the post office, ad nauseum. Ripping the important tax documents from my unsuspecting hands, running away gleefully and “mailing” them somewhere in the house has been her favorite past time this week. Sy’s her name, mail’s her game. She had been using the Learning Tower as her mail box, but it irked her a bit that her invented mail box had no real cover on it. Of course I should have just let her make stuff up, especially after reading that NPR article about the downfall of our kids due to all those thematic toys out there. But no, I’d been checking out the Melissa and Doug Mailbox and opted for that. Sorry about your brain, kid. Mama just got you a new toy.
Roger heard some interesting articles on NPR this week. This article is about how old-fashioned play (based on the activity versus the toy itself) helps executive function (self-regulation).
And then check out the follow-up article about a pre-school that focuses solely on teaching how to implement executive function.
Ok, well, I’m going to go and sell all of Roger’s video games now. Just kidding, hub. Sort of.
