Toys and Games Category Archive

Building forts is part of growing up. It starts with hiding under blankets and develops into creating complex structures from blankets, chairs, couch cushions and whatever else is around. Unfortunately, blankets, chairs and heavy books limit you to only basic structures. But the folks at The Happy Kid Company in Princeton, MA came up with [...]

Back in October I mentioned that several people had suggested letting kids use a digital camera to record the road trip for themselves.  Although my 2.5 year-old understands the basics of using our regular camera with supervision, there’s no way a Canon, or any other “adult” digital camera, could survive the occasional drop, not to [...]

PlayStation 3. XBox 360. Nintendo Wii. There’s no doubt that video games are big business and it’s not always easy to tell which ones are appropriate for your children. And with the wide range of games available, not to mention the amount of advertising dollars being spent to promote them, it’s a safe bet that [...]

Friday night my wife and I were discussing the lead paint-related recalls with a friend. As we discussed the recalls and the media coverage of them, we kept coming back to one question: why is lead paint used at all anymore? Fortunately, the August 15 Explainer column at Slate answers this very question. Basically, lead [...]

Just a few weeks after Thomas the Train toys were recalled due to lead paint, another company has announced a recall. This time it’s Fisher-Price and the recall involves 967,000 plastic preschool toys sold between May and August. If you purchased a Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Elmo, Sesame Street…ok, any Fisher-Price toys after [...]

As part of their Summer Reading in the Magic Tree House program, Barnes and Noble are giving away free children’s books between May 29th and September 2nd to kids who read eight books and write briefly about their favorite parts of each of them in a “Summer Reading Journal” (available free at the link below [...]

I have a confession: I don’t understand Tickle Me Elmo, T.M.X. or otherwise. I don’t understand why people fight to get one. And while I can see why people sell them on eBay for a sizeable profit, I certainly don’t understand why people will pay well above the $40 retail to get one. In the [...]

File this one under “now why didn’t I think of that??” Although our daughter travels well, it can be a challenge to manage the her stuff in addition to ours. Watching other families, one answer seems to be giving kids their own backpack or roller bag to manage as soon as they’re old enough. Of [...]

One of the best parts of classic board games like Monopoly and Life was the stacks of play money that came with the games. Setting up each player with the proper combination of bills at startup and deciding who got to be the banker was part of the fun. And let’s not forget the effect [...]

Ok, I’ll be honest: I like video games. I grew up in the age of the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision; my brother introduced me to the original Nintendo Entertainment System; and Doom came out when I was in college. I still enjoy playing video games with friends and I definitely look forward to playing [...]