Umba Box: the monthly gift you give to yourself
If you're the Mom, that means you probably buy the birthday presents, the holiday presents, the housewarming presents, the Your First Recital presents, the Sorry Your Husband Got Fired presents. And the only time you ever get a surprise involves the question, "Mom,...
It was a dark and stormy diaper…
Ask my mom, and she'll tell you that she knew I was a writer from the moment I was born, or at least from the moment I started scrawling my first story on the wall in... um... nevermind. Too bad they didn't have this onesie back then. The utterly adorable The...
Build your own zombiepocalypse
Legos are just so timeless, so simple, so wholesome. You can build houses and cities and adorable robots, sprawled in front of a roaring fire with your future architect.Or you can turn those happy little blocks into a zombie-infested nightmare rife with bloodstains...
Bottle accessories that get the drying done in style
One of my least favorite parts about the baby stage is all that bottle stuff. The making of the bottles (especially at 4 in the morning), the cleaning of them and the finding somewhere to put them. Two cool-looking new accessories from Beaba offer relief for at least...
Memory meets Modern Art
We played lots of board games in my house growing up, and with a 4 year age difference, there were few my sister and I could both make it through without quitting. (We in fact have never completed a game of Monopoly to this day.) One of the few games we both loved...
Here kitty, kitty kitty…
I have animal-crazy daughters, a wonderful characteristic I attribute in part to awesome grandparents that think to buy them "animal things" before buying them "princess things." So I was thrilled to see a nice partnership between National Geographic and Pottery Barn...
Special custom invites for very special days
I am fairly confident in my taste, and know when I see an invitation that's special and different. But making it myself? No way. So I am happy to know there are some wonderful artists and designers out there who are willing to work with picky people like me to make us...
Kids costumes that look handmade (because they are)
I did this thing last year where I decided it to hand-make my daughter a Big Bird costume for Halloween--feather by feather. I'm not a natural costume-maker, so the whole thing was imperfect--but it was fun to make and she dug it.This year, time constraints and other...
The Maclaren denim stroller rides again, this time for two
I'm something of a stroller hoarder. We have gone through no less than ten strollers between my two sons--which is actually par for the course in New York, where our strollers are our cars. One of my faves is still the Maclaren Denim Quest which I reviewed some months...
Cool educational toys, hold the batteries
When we're running out the door on one of our million weekly errands, it's way too easy to just grab the iPad or a handheld electronic game to occupy the kids. But in my ongoing quest to "unplug" a little more often, I've discovered a neat line of hand-held edu-toys...