Over the past many months I’ve share with you our all-time favorite toys. These aren’t sales pitches, they are (as always) my absolutely from-the-heart, honest opinions after 22+ years of mothering and 22+ years of buying toys — some that were hits and some that were a waste of money and space! Here’s a consolidated [...]
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We love board and card games. Unlike most video games, they provide a great venue to interact with your children (and other adults) and many of them are truly educational. They may teach vocabulary, math, geography, music, and lots of critical thinking. We have scheduled a couple of hours every week specifically for game playing. [...]
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Sure, we’ve got the usual box scratch paper, bins of broken crayons, mismatched sets of colored paper, watercolor sets with black mixed into the yellow, clogged glue bottles, and dried up glue sticks. The usual. But when we really want to do artwork, we get out the special stash of the good stuff. Elementary School [...]
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Our very first major purchase after we married in August of 1985, was a Mac 512k (aka the “Fat Mac”). We only bought it under the condition that for every penny Sam spent on computer related paraphernalia, I got a matching fund for clothing. Soon, I became enamored with the little box and we had [...]
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I am under no illusion that I have to introduce anyone to Legos. But it’s impossible to write a “best toys” series without including them. So here is my obligatory “Legos are awesome” post. We started almost 22 years ago with our first set of giant, age-appropriate Duplo blocks. But because we had a toddler [...]
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When I was four-years-old, my neighbor friend, Chris Olsen, brought out the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was a pair of wooden marble runs. You took a marble, put it at the top and watched it run down the little track about two feet, hit the end, turn the corner, and head down the [...]
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Last month I wrote about the amazing GeoTrax Railroad. Remember what I said about expandability. I’m not just talking about more tracks. Fisher-Price has done the add-on one better. Part of the GeoTrax family is the fabulous GeoAir! Picture a toy train in airplane form with a track that loops through the sky, to the [...]
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A few years ago one of our boys asked for the Fisher-Price Geotrax Rail and Road System Grand Central Station for Christmas. Although we’d never heard of it, we looked into it. We liked what we saw. GeoTrax is a battery-powered, remote-controlled railroad train system. It comes in a large set with the big Grand [...]
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Growing up in a musical family introduced me to so many wonderful opportunities. From singing and playing the violin to directing a teen swing choir, the musical foundation my parents gave me has brought so much joy to me and, now, to my kids that it’s immeasurable. One of my earliest musical experiences is playing [...]
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In the early 1990′s—not long after moving to Florida—I was introduced to Playmobil when a friend gathered up her kids and invited me to bring mine to the Playmobil Fun Park in Palm Beach Gardens. For $1.00 each, your kids can spend hours and hours in 20,000 square feet of play area with literally tens [...]
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