Youtopia

I'll be honest -- as an art teacher, I was once opposed to rubber stamps. Then I realized that giving children some handy, thoughtfully designed building blocks for their two-dimensional world can be the perfect springboard into confidence and imagination. The Cityscape Stamp Set by Yellow Owl Workshop includes five maple-mounted, natural rubber stamps reminiscent of San Francisco, thanks to the tree and bike stamps nestled between skyscrapers and houses. You get a road, too, but there's no rule about how much greenspace you can create.

The stamps come all snuggled up in a lovely, hand-finished birch box for gift-giving or simply to keep your own kids happy in the car if you're traveling this holiday weekend. And if you want to send your stick people on vacation, they offer Landscape and Winterscape stamp sets too.

I can see my kids in a few years, huddled over the kitchen table, planting the seeds of Utopia and adding marvelous little details with their markers. It's the best of all possible worlds. ~Delilah

Buy the Cityscape Stamp Set at Grumpy Bert, a haven for designer-designed goodies.