Peapods Favorite #14: Our Handmade Wooden Magnetic Fishing Pole

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

Made in Indiana by Darren and Teresa of My Unique Wooden Toys, our magnetic wooden fishing pole is truly a classic. Designed for ages 3 and up, kids love reeling out the magnetic "hook" (a wooden ball with a weak magnet attached) and reeling in a fish! It's a lot of fun for a very simple toy.

For more fun on a rainy day, set up an indoor fishing pond! Simply drape a blanket across the back of two chairs and have your child cast her line over the blanket and into the pond. Which fish will bite? From the other side of the blanket, attach a different color fish with each cast (or maybe a spoon or a paper clip!). We've also seen this idea used for school fairs with winning prize numbers attached to each fish. There aren't any blinking lights or beeping sounds, but it's nonetheless a great diversion for any 3-5 year old.

Each fishing pole comes with three fish and extra wooden fish are also available.

Peapods Favorite #13: Dancing Alligator Pull Toy by Plan Toys

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

Plan Toys' Dancing Alligator Wooden Pull Toy is another iconic Peapods toy! Made in Thailand from reclaimed rubberwood, the Dancing Alligator wiggles and chomps and makes a compelling clacking sound as you pull it along.  We've always appreciated the Dancing Alligator's play value--toddlers just learning how to walk enjoy chasing after it and older kids will enjoy pulling it throughout the house. We also like the alligator's cousin, the Plan Toys Pull-Along Snail.

As we've written many times before, we also appreciate the extremely high quality of Plan Toys and their commitment to environmental sustainability and social responsibility. Plan Toys are toys that you can really feel good about!

Making Dancing Alligators at the Plan Toys Factory in Thailand . Visit Plan's website to learn more about their environmental and social responsibility initiatives.

Peapods Favorite #12: Haba Fantasy Blocks

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

 

Made in Germany, Haba Fantasy Blocks take block play in a completely unique direction! Designed to complement a collection of unit blocks or to play with on their own, Fantasy Blocks use color, sound, and light play through a prism to encourage experimentation and creativity.

We've carried Fantasy Blocks for years, so they get the nod as our favorite.  But, we've also added several other unique Haba block sets, including Cordoba, Sevilla, Torrino, and Sakrada, each with its own style. Haba also makes several colorful wooden block sets with chunkier pieces for younger children, including the Habaland Play Set, the Large Animal Play Set, and their incredible new My First Ball Track set, which is part block play and part kenetic fun. All of these sets are compatible--mix them together to create amazing Suessian architecture!

How are Haba's colorful Fantasy Blocks made? Watch this video tour of the Haba factory in Germany, which documents the process from forest to toy store!

Peapods Favorite #11: the Haba Wooden Walker Wagon

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

The Haba Wooden Walker Wagon is an incredible toy for a one year old. Both our sons Riley and Duncan learned to walk while pushing this incredibly sturdy toy all around.  Made in Germany from sturdy baltic birch plywood, this is a toy that kids can jump up and down on without making a dent. 

The Haba walker wagon works best on a long stretch of open sidewalk. Or, during inclement weather, try taking it with you to a mall and point your child and the wagon toward open floor and watch her go. (We always preferred Har Mar Mall for this purpose.) As your child grows, the walker wagon can double as a doll stroller or toy transporter. 

This is the first of several Peapods Favorites by Haba, so stay tuned for more!

Peapods Favorite #10: The Rainbow Lawnmower Push Toy by Papa Don's - Made in Oregon

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

Papa Don's tumbling rainbow lawnmower push toy has been a favorite of ours for over a decade. Push toys are a perfect one year old birthday present. And, if you've ever seen (or heard!) the blinking and beeping electronic versions sold nowadays in mass market stores, you'll know why we like Papa Don's so much.  It's simple, colorful fun that won't overstimulate a toddler or drive the adults out of the house. Made in Oregon from solid hardwoods, it's truly an heirloom toy that's likely to last for more than just one generation. 

Papa Don's began in 1973 and is one of several of our toymakers who have grown their business at the famous Eugene, Oregon Saturday Market. Papa Don's daughter Diana and her husband Garth are now second generation toymakers, carrying on her father's business after her his death in 2009. We think it's wonderful that a multi-generational family business lives on through these wonderful toys and we're proud to have been a small part of that story over the past dozen years or so.

Papa Don's Toys also makes a floor tumbler, which is basically the caged beads part of the rainbow lawnmower, a colorful stacking rings toy, and a bead threading toy.

Dispatch from the 2012 ABC Kids Expo

Whoa! It's been a busy few days! On Saturday, we talked to hundreds of people at the Twin Cities Birth and Baby Expo, an amazing event that was crazy busy this year. It was great to talk to so many new and expecting parents and our peers in the Twin Cities natural birth and baby scene. (Special thanks to Nichi from My Healthy Beginning for jumping our car after the event!)

Early the next day, we were off to Louisville, KY for the annual ABC Kids Expo. With Ellie in her Beco Gemini, we walked the entire 8 miles of the Expo twice over three days, talking to hundreds of baby product manufacturers. We got to see a bunch of new products and reconnect with many of our vendors, including Haba, Beco, Rockin' Green, bumGenius, Naturepedic, Green Toys, Chewbeads, Zutano, gDiapers, and many, many more. Of course, Ellie got to talk to them all, too, which she loved. Seems like our girl is a little social butterfly!

Checking out new teething toys with Chewbeads.

Of course, we found lots of great new products that we'll be featuring in the coming weeks. We really appreciate seeing stuff in person. Ellie got to try many of them herself, too, including a bunch of new baby carriers. We can't wait to share what we found!

The Bad Idea Fairy
As always, the Bad Idea Fairy was busy at work at the ABC Kids Expo. This year's Expo had binders full of questionable new products, many of which sought to solve problems that don't really exist or are more easily solved by simpler means.  It's become our annual tradition to share some of our favorites (search for "expo" in the box at right for previous years). Here's our picks for 2012:

Snow Patrol Ergo: Not sure what's going on at Ergo, which was bought out by a new company a little over a year ago. One of their latest offerings is this all-white carrier lined with fake fur that comes complete with a muff for $195. We though it looked like something from a James Bond movie or perhaps the snow battle dream from Inception. Just be sure to keep grape juice away from it.

The Peeko Baby Monitor: We saw a couple variations of this idea, which is a baby monitor that "monitors your baby's respiration, room temperature, and body positioning on your phone from anywhere in the world". The Peeko did this via a wifi device on a onesie while others used video monitors or a mat placed on the crib mattress. We thought a better idea might be to put down the phone and pick up the baby.

Tinkle Tinkle Little Star: For another hi-tech fix, we found the Potty Patrol Diaper Alarm. These special disposable diapers use an alarm that plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star whenever they're wet because, as the inventor states, it's really hard for a toddler to know when he's wet in a disposable diaper. We're not sure what the long-term effect of this auditory operant conditioning will be whenever he hears Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for the rest of his life, but we're pretty sure cloth diapers are a simpler solution.

Diamonds are Forever: Yes, this is an ad for a $17,000 pacifier.

The hills are alive with portable potty chairs:
Finally, here's this marketing image for an otherwise perfectly good potty chair by Regal Lager. Sometimes an image can oversell a product...

Peapods Favorite #9: DoodleTown Cars, Made in Minnesota

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on Facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!

We really love DoodleTown Cars! What can we say? They just make us happy. They're made in Minnesota, they're safe for all ages, they smell wonderful, they make perfect stocking stuffers, and they're great for pretend play, block play, or travelling. And, Mike and Linda, the folks who make them, happened to be just about the nicest people we've ever met.

Mike began making DoodleTown Cars back in 1972 and his classic design has endured. Over the years, he's sold his cars to toy stores across the country, to a US President, and at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. Today, DoodleTown cars can be found in dozens of small toy stores from coast to coast, but we're proud to be Mike and Linda's biggest fans. Over the years we've sold several thousand Doodles. We've probably sold more Doodle Cars than any other toy!

DoodleTown also recently added a semi truck and a train with tender that are on the same scale as the Doodle Cars.

We hope you like Doodles as much as we do!

Here's a WCCO-TV profile on Mike and Linda from November 2011:

Peapods Favorite #8: The Ping Pong Catapult

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!  

This is such a simple toy, but it's created a lot of fun in the past 12 years or so! Made in Oregon by Mike Spikes' American Toy Company, the Ping Pong Catapult shoots ping pong balls across the room. We've had many customers who buy this toy for every birthday kid they know from ages 5 to 45. 

Kids love the ping pong catapult because it invites experimentation. Can you know down a tower of spools with it? Can you land the ball in a cardboard box? Will it launch an acorn, a conker, or a Lego guy? Can you make the ball go farther by launching it down the stairs? Can you bounce the ball off a wall and catch it?

During all this play and experimenting, your kids will be running back and forth, maybe even up and down stairs, retrieving ping pong balls and launching them over and over. Honestly, we can't think of a better rainy day toy to burn off steam with some creative kinetic energy!

Peapods Favorite #7: Wooden Unit Blocks by BEKA - Made in Minnesota

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!  

There's one toy that's been front and center in our living room for 15 years. One toy that's been played with by 3 kids (soon to be a fourth!) from ages 1 to over 12. It's our set of BEKA maple unit blocks. Since we bought them 15 years ago, they've never been been in storage but have always been at the ready for building towers, roads, bridges, forts, marble runs, arches, and a hundred other creations. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, BEKA's maple unit blocks are the best toy we've ever owned.

BEKA blocks are made in St. Paul, Minnesota from solid maple. Like many of our favorite toys, we've been carrying BEKA products since we first opened in 1999. We also carry BEKA train tables and easels.

Of course, our kids aren't alone in their love of simple wooden blocks. Wooden blocks have been a childhood favorite for centuries. Unit blocks were the core of the original Kindergarten curriculum formulated by Frederich Froebel and were praised by Maria Montessori, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote:

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home. 

We offer BEKA blocks in three different sets: Starter Unit Blocks, Standard Unit Blocks, and Deluxe Unit Blocks. The differences between the sets are in the number of blocks and the variety of shapes; the Standard Set is probably the best place to start your block collection.

We give our thanks to BEKA and the entire Kreisman family for their wonderful toys and for working with us for so many great years. They really are a Peapods favorite!

Peapods Favorite #6: Sarah's Silks Play Silks

Peapods Favorites is our continuing series about our all-time favorite toys. Keep and an eye on facebook  and Pinterest for more favorites through the holiday season!  

We've always believed that open-ended toys are the best; toys that require kids to imagine and invent their purpose. We can offer no better example of this than Sarah's Silks Playsilks.

Sarah's Silks has been a staple of our store since we opened in 1999. Their playsilks are wonderful, sheer and airy squares of colorful silk that can be anything a child wants them to be--a cape, a skirt, a hat, a scarf, a crown, an ocean of water, or a bed of grass.  Available in two sizes, the original playsilks are  35" square and the mini playsilks are 21" square. Our kids have used them over and over again in a million ways.

Like wood blocks, playsilks are an open-ended invitation to pretend.  We also stock a great selection of capes, fairy wings, and garlands from Sarah's Silks to complete the perfect dress-up wardrobe.