Toys

There are many benefits to buying handmade goods this holiday season. It makes for more meaningful giving, it supports local craftsmen and is overall better for the environment. The accumulating effects of mass production are a major cause of global warming. If buying with a conscious is high on your list of things to do this holiday season, where do you find high quality handmade goods? The internet is crawling with items that claim to be unique and handmade but it is almost impossible to discern the junk from the gems. Here is the 411 on where to get unique handmade goods in NYC.

Mommy Poppins is teaming up with A Child Grows in Brooklyn to host two great events and we hope you can come!

RSVP NOW!

Right before the Holidays is a great time to clean out the toy chests and make room for the new incoming toys while encouraging the spirit of giving.

Bring your gently used toys to our Toy Swap.

Find new treasures to take home.

Bring a new, unwrapped toy for out Holiday Toy Drive.

Everything left over at the end of the day will be donated to charity.

Kidville will be providing children's activities
and free open gym time.

Enjoy healthy snacks from Susie's Supper Club
while you browse and chat with friends new and old.

Door Prizes! Space is limited. First to RSVP will win an item from our swag table: video games, dvds, cds, toys, books and more.

Perhaps when your kids were babies you only gave them hand made wooden toys and never bought them anything with a character on it, but once you send your kids to school, all bets are off. All of a sudden status is measured by how much brightly colored plastic you have in your room, hanging from your backpack and printed on your T-Shirts.

And for kids these days, especially the boys, Pokemon branded plastic seems to be the most treasured. But the Pokemon empire extends far beyond the world of adorable plastic figures, there's cards, video games and stuffed animals to collect also. My kids can't get enough of any of it.

Kick scooters are great for New York City kids. We do a lot of walking, which can be hard on little legs and wearisome. I have one of those little guys who would whine with every step and I'd find myself dragging him down the street having to laugh off all the people that were giving me those bad mom glares (oh if they only knew). Got him a scooter and viola, now I can barely keep up with him.

But finding the right scooter took a while. At three we got him a three wheel toddler scooter that didn't work very well and at four, while he was too big for that, he still couldn't handle a two wheeled scooter. Then we discovered the Micro Mini Kick and the new Micro Maxi Kick Scooters.

Read on to find out how you could win a new Micro Maxi Scooter or get one for your school fundraising auction or raffle.

Exergaming is all the rage now with parents (and corporations) trying to figure out how to get kids up off the couch and moving. The Wii is obviously the biggest sensation in exergaming, finally allowing parents to feel less guilty about hours spent in front of the TV, but there are lots of other fun games that get kids moving while they are having fun playing. And, hey, it's not so bad for mom and dad to play along and get a little exercise too. I've been surprised at how out of breath I can get from playing these games and you don't have to spend a lot.

Top 5 Games that get kids moving:

America is moving forward by looking backward. As they compare Obama to JFK and anticipate his bringing some forward-thinking good old retro energy to the White House, I am also looking back for some great ideas for Christmas gifts back in the day when kids got presents a little more stimulating than a Nintendo DS or the latest iteration of Tickle Me Elmo. I'm not thinking about BB Guns, a la A Christmas Story, I'm thinking about science kits like chemistry sets and electronics sets.

I don't know when science kits stopped being the cool gift kids wanted (gee did it have something to do with the video game?), but I can't think of anything cooler than finding one of these sets under the tree. I have to admit that I wasn't all that psyched about trying out the chemistry and electronics sets in our science kit review process, but we had more fun with these kits than with any other.

All kids love science. At least they do until someone teaches them it's not fun. So grab the opportunity by the horns and get your kid some of these cool science kits for the holidays this year. It may not be what they are asking for, but they will have an amazing time and you will too.

Me and my crack team of toy reviewers (aged 4-10) set about working our way through no less than fourteen of the coolest science kits that we could find. In this post I will be writing about the best ones for little kids, aged 4 and up.

The thing we found when trying out all these science kits is that there are three kinds of science kits:

1. Project kits. I call it a project kit when a science kit is really about the packaging and has one or a couple of activities with a thinly veiled connection to science. It might be fun to make rainbow crystals, but it's not really a science kit, it's a project kit, in my opinion.

2. Bad Science Kits. The second category of kits are ones that are either not fun or the science is not made relevant to the kids so they don't really learn anything from this. I have coined the term "bad science kits" for these ones (trademark pending).

3. Great Science Kits. The third type of kit we found were the winners. To be a great science kit for kids, there had to be enough different experiments to make it fun to come back to again and again and the science had to be fun and made relevant to the kids so they really could learn the basic principles involved.

It seems like too much to ask, but we did find some great science kits, perfect for preschoolers, and we want to share them with you.

Last week we posted about Drop and Dine, a fabulous new way to enjoy dinner out at a restaurant together/alone with your toddler or child. Today we've got another great solution for eating out with kids??”Fun-a-Go-Go??”and we're giving away whole party pack of them.

Fun-a-Go-Go is a deceptively simple solution for entertaining children in a restaurant. It's just a small folio with a dry erase board and marker that clips on so it never gets lost. The kit has dozens of game and activity ideas printed on it to keep your little one entertained through even the longest restaurant meal. There's even more ideas posted on their website, or you can make up your own.

Recommended for children ages 3 and up, I think Fun-a-Go-Go is great. I love the simplicity of it, the way it allows you to interact with your children to get them set up in games that they can then continue on their own, allowing you to eat and talk.

Cranium, the innovative non-competitive game company, has just released a new line of games aimed at preschoolers. Cranium Bloom games seem to be designed to guide parents in educational interactive play with their children.

At Mommy Poppins we always try to provide real information by real parents that you will really use. So what could be better than a gift guide created by your fellow NYC parents. This guide will be just as useful for birthday gifts as it is for Holiday presents. And at the end of the post, we'll announce our lucky winner of the $100 gift certificate to the Scholastic Store.