I’m a big fan of Elmer’s. Love your glue, Elmer. What’s not to love? It’s sticky, it sticks things together, you can pour a lot of it all over your hand and try to peel it off in one go. Hours of fun with a bottle of glue. So when I saw that they had a line of really cool paint pens, I jumped at ‘em. Elmer’s Paintastics come in a set of five “pens” with paint brush tops. The washable, water color paint is already inside, so all you have to do is squeeze to activate and voila, paint oozes from the attached brush and a water color masterpiece is born.
Only, they didn’t really work. In fact, I was so irritated by our Paintastics, I think they should be renamed “Pain in the Ass Sticks.”
Andie’s son Max got this Click Clack Tree by Plan Toys for his third birthday. Andie and I were playing with it and we honestly could not figure out where the “hours of fun” would come from. I’ve never seen a Plan Toys toy I didn’t like, but there is a first time for everything, right?
This toy is beautiful: a little wooden “tree” with tracks for the bug balls to roll back and forth along. And that’s all it does. The bugs roll back and forth and then you pick em up and do it again. It says three and up, most likely for the size of the bug and possibly dexterity of putting the bugs back, but most three year olds I know would do this about three times and then be off and running onto the next activity. Andie and I played with the bugs while the kids were on the floor doing something else. Sy, queen of the long attention span, sidled up and watched for a minute before skittering off to the next thing.
I saw this Boppy pregnancy wedge pillow at Mimi Maternity the other day and thought Oh! The perfect solution to my sleep troubles (as if).
I planned on reviewing it, but that aint gonna happen. I opened up the packaging and the pillow smelled SO GNARLY. I smelled the bag to see if that was the issue, but nope, it was the foam. The sour chemical smell was overwhelming. After reading so much about safe bedding and all that rot, I decided that airing it out and hoping for the best was not an option. I then went over to the new Boppy pillow I just got, hoping it would smell better. It was fine, luckily made from materials other than total toxi-foam.
YUCK, Boppy-People, YUCK!
I am a huge fan of Alton Brown of Good Eats/Food TV fame. I love his scientific/geeky/humorous approach to food. He’s also got some tasty recipes, I use any excuse to make his chewy chocolate chip cookies . Anyway, Alton Brown is not a fan of the uni-tasker tool in his kitchen. You know, like an asparagus peeler. What else can you do with it but peel asparagus? Alton demands his kitchen utensils to be multi-taskers (his one uni-tasker exception: the fire extinguisher). I tend to approach Sy’s toy purchases the same way. Is this toy only going to be good for one sort of game, or will it be more open ended and hold my kid’s attention long enough for me to peel my asparagus the old fashioned way, with a vegetable peeler. I got the Zolo Stacking Magnetic Acrobats (Stacrobats!) for Sy when she was about a 16 months old. Alas. I think this is a case of a toy gone uni-tasker.
Hoo boy, anyone who is anyone in our toddler set luuuurves this toy. It makes me insane. Why does everything in Fisher-Prices’s Laugh & Learn series make me want to run screaming from the living room? Regardless of my constant search for quiet toys, the toddlers in my life adore this hunk of plastic. It’s actually not all that bad, but for love of all things auditory, why on earth does the thing have to be so loud?? Luckily it gives you a choice of
1) SUPER LOUD or
2) You decided to take the toy to a Motley Crew concert and it got used to having TO SHOUT REALLY, REALLY LOUDLY to keep up with Vince Neil’s vocal stylings.
Ed. Note:
Jenny M and her kids have been on an art rampage. This review concludes Ms. M’s four part review of Crayola’s indoor/outdoor drawing instruments.
At first glance, these appear to be brilliant: first, they’re not markers, and second, they’re crayons that won’t break, because they’re housed in plastic like a twistable eyeliner, allowing for only a short drawing tip.
I bought these drawing implements for an airplane trip thinking that the gimmicky aspect of their not looking or acting like a traditional crayon or marker would contribute to keeping my two daughters busy. And busy they were, pulling the innards out and breaking them in short order. There is a serious design flaw here; the crayon inside is not grooved enough to require twisting to get it out--all you have to do is pull the tip. And then you have tiny pieces of a thin crayon and plastic casings everywhere, which from a waste standpoint is worse than regular crayons.
Dear Learning Puppy,
I have some bad news for you. I think it’s time for you to move out. No, you are not going to be shoved in the back of the toy closet (again) only to be resurrected by Sy in a couple of months. I can’t take the break-up/make-up routine anymore! It’s more serious than that. I think it’s time you move to the consignment shop at the foot of the hill, because Puppy, it’s over. Do you hear me? O-V-E-R. I no longer want to sing and play games with you. I don’t want to hug you. I’m tired of hearing about your YELLOW FOOT! I just want you and your blinking dog bone collar out of my home forever.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some good times together. I’ll never forget the time I gently tapped your nose and you said to me, “RED NOSE!” I felt like you really meant what you said. But as the years have passed, your once-charming ways have become one dimensional, almost superficial. I mean, how deep can you be when you are only surface washable?
