Friday, June 19, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Peapods Sidewalk Sale June 26-27
Don't miss our awesome, spectacular, irresistible, sensational, once-a-year Sidewalk Sale! June 26 and 27, 10am to 6pm. Closeouts, scratch 'n dents, discontinued items, samples and questionable ideas all marked 25-75% off.
We do recommend leaving small children at home for at least the first few hours of this event--there's always a lot of people and Snelling Avenue is a busy street. See you there!
Sunday, June 14, 2009
ASTRA Toy Store Convention in St Paul
If you happened to be in our store yesterday afternoon, you might have been pretty surprised when a tour bus pulled up and 50 people came into our store. What the heck was that? Well, the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association (ASTRA) is having its annual convention here in St. Paul and we were on the local store tour. Basically, these were toy store owners from across the country who've all come to town to talk shop for a couple of days. It was great to show off our store to so many like-minded folks, but it feels even better to be showing off St. Paul, which looks pretty darn good in the month of June, doesn't it?
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Let the Children Run Free
If you're on our mailing list, our annual newsletter should be arriving soon. If not, you can read it online, too. The following is one of the articles we wrote, which is about the free range kids movement.
(Duncan in Berkely, CA)
Our daughter Abby became a teenager a few months ago—it’s hard for us to believe that our little “Peapod” has become a young woman. And, we’ve been thinking about what we did at her age and how uncomfortable we would be with those things now.
Dan at thirteen often took the bus downtown and spent the day exploring skyways and record stores. Millie gathered signatures against nuclear weapons in Uptown for INFACT. Somehow, both of these activities in this day and age fills us with fear.
In this day and age? Who are we kidding? Why would we be more scared now of our daughter being out in the world than when we were hanging out in City Center or Lake & Hennepin? A generation of fear has blunted our instincts and caused us to trust our children less. Two decades of media saturation about the dangers of the world have left us struggling to reconcile our childhoods with our parenting.
Lately, we’ve come to recognize that if we want to raise strong, capable, self-actualized children, we need to overcome these fears. Thankfully, Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement (freerangekids.wordpress.com) is leading the way. Lenore’s journey began when she wrote about letting her nine year old son Izzy ride the NYC subway on his own. In doing so, she tapped into the humongous schism that’s grown between reason and fear in the minds of every parent today. “Somehow,” she writes, “a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing.”
In her new book, Lenore takes on all the crazy things we do as parents because of fear, not the least of which are the ridiculous safety products that use fear to make a buck. We’ve seen loads of these—knee pads for crawling toddlers, GPS tracking devices, marionette-like harnesses for learning to walk, helmets to cushion falls, and “glovies” to keep germs off little hands. All of these products not only deny a half million years of human evolution, but also plant in our children an insidious, damaging message: You are not fit for this world. You need constant protection. Be afraid.
As parents, we know it’s a constant struggle between our instincts to protect and to create
healthy, capable children. Unlike birds, there is no single moment when our children fly from the nest—it’s something that happens every day in a thousand tiny steps. What’s important is what’s between our ears each time our children take a step out into the world. Do we inveigh a sense of fear or trust? We’re hardly perfect, but we’re bending our minds toward trust.
(Duncan in Berkely, CA)Our daughter Abby became a teenager a few months ago—it’s hard for us to believe that our little “Peapod” has become a young woman. And, we’ve been thinking about what we did at her age and how uncomfortable we would be with those things now.
Dan at thirteen often took the bus downtown and spent the day exploring skyways and record stores. Millie gathered signatures against nuclear weapons in Uptown for INFACT. Somehow, both of these activities in this day and age fills us with fear.
In this day and age? Who are we kidding? Why would we be more scared now of our daughter being out in the world than when we were hanging out in City Center or Lake & Hennepin? A generation of fear has blunted our instincts and caused us to trust our children less. Two decades of media saturation about the dangers of the world have left us struggling to reconcile our childhoods with our parenting.
Lately, we’ve come to recognize that if we want to raise strong, capable, self-actualized children, we need to overcome these fears. Thankfully, Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement (freerangekids.wordpress.com) is leading the way. Lenore’s journey began when she wrote about letting her nine year old son Izzy ride the NYC subway on his own. In doing so, she tapped into the humongous schism that’s grown between reason and fear in the minds of every parent today. “Somehow,” she writes, “a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing.”
In her new book, Lenore takes on all the crazy things we do as parents because of fear, not the least of which are the ridiculous safety products that use fear to make a buck. We’ve seen loads of these—knee pads for crawling toddlers, GPS tracking devices, marionette-like harnesses for learning to walk, helmets to cushion falls, and “glovies” to keep germs off little hands. All of these products not only deny a half million years of human evolution, but also plant in our children an insidious, damaging message: You are not fit for this world. You need constant protection. Be afraid.
As parents, we know it’s a constant struggle between our instincts to protect and to create
healthy, capable children. Unlike birds, there is no single moment when our children fly from the nest—it’s something that happens every day in a thousand tiny steps. What’s important is what’s between our ears each time our children take a step out into the world. Do we inveigh a sense of fear or trust? We’re hardly perfect, but we’re bending our minds toward trust.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Introducing Lumberjack Logs - Made in Minnesota
We are proud to present Lumberjack Logs, a brand new toy that's made right here in Minnesota from solid maple. We're the first toy store to have them and we even got a chance to work with the toymakers to develop them.
We like these a lot because they're audaciously big and the finished structure is extremely stable. The roof is held in place with a notched roof beam that keeps it from tipping over and the second story has a floor made out of maple slats.
What that means is that building the structure is only half the fun. Once it's built, you can play with it with dollhouse dolls, toy horses, toy furniture, etc. The play value of these toys is tremendous.
Available as either a cabin or a barn, Lumberjack Logs are available now in our store. In fact, we have the cabin set up and ready to play with. Stop in and let us know what you think.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
NYTimes Conversation on Women & Breastfeeding
Hanna Rosin, left, of The Atlantic (perhaps you've heard about her article in the April Atlantic) and Ruth Lawrence of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, a longtime breastfeeding advocate, discuss what breast-feeding means for nursing mothers. (Follow the link at the bottom of the page to continue the video when it stops.)
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