top toys 2015 - Stuff Parents Need

Thomas & Friends DVD Brought to Life with the TrackMaster™ Shipwreck Rails Set

December 9, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · 3 Comments

This post brought to you by Fisher-Price. The content and opinions expressed below are that of Stuff Parents Need.

Are you watching lots of fun family movies this time of year? We’ve been having family movie night almost every night so far this month! There are SO many great holiday movies to choose from, and there are also some great new releases out on DVD to check out.

We just watched this fun feature-length film, Thomas & Friends DVD, Sodor’s Legend of the Lost Treasure

This was a really fun flick; it was such a treat to snuggle on the couch with my girls and go on an adventure that combined the thrill of the rails AND the thrill of the sea! And Thomas certainly has a lot going on in this movie, as he discovers a lost pirate ship AND a lost treasure!

And after watching the movie, it was time to recreate it right in our living room, with help from the Thomas & Friends™ TrackMaster™ Shipwreck Rails Set from Fisher-Price

What a wild ride Thomas gets to go on with this set, friends! This track (which is compatible with all other TrackMaster rails, FYI) takes Thomas to new heights and throws him for quite a loop, too! He also gets to discover some hidden treasure as part of the adventure.

The girls have played nonstop with the set since watching the DVD. Their favorite thing to do is to send Thomas on that steep spiral spin, which he masterfully executes time after time! There is an auto-reset function that allows the spin to run over and over without interruption.

The Thomas & Friends TrackMaster Shipwreck Rails set is recommended for ages 3 and up (adults or older children will be needed for assembly) and you can find it and the DVD at your nearest Walmart or at Walmart.com. What a perfect gift these items would be for the Thomas & Friends fan on your holiday gift list!

THE Game for the Holidays: Pie Face!

December 8, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · 1 Comment

Thanks to Hasbro for providing Pie Face for review purposes. All thoughts and opinions are my own, as always. Affiliate links may be included at no cost to you.

You have likely seen the viral video of the grown man and little boy playing Pie Face! If not, here’s a link (it’s ok, I’ll wait!).

You guys, it’s just that funny to play! I laughed SO HARD the first time my husband got smacked in the face with some whipped cream. It was HILARIOUS!

And when it was my turn, I DIDN’T get hit in the face, which was so disappointing to Tim because he filmed the moment in slo-mo. Check it!

When you don’t get pie in your face. #hasbro #pieface

A video posted by Tiffany (@stuffparentsneed) on Dec 6, 2015 at 11:28am PST

The concept behind the game is very simple: the first person to get to 25 points wins. To earn points, simply spin the spinner. The number it lands on (2, 3, 4 or 5) is the number of clicks you have to turn the pie face machine with your face in it. If you are not hit with the “pie” (you just use whip cream) then you get double that amount of points. So if you did 5 clicks and didn’t get hit, you earned 10 points.

If you are feeling scared, you can opt for a lower number of clicks on your turn, but of course, that means fewer points to earn if you aren’t hit! Darah was brave enough to try the game (and she whooped and hollered and rolled on the floor laughing the entire time) but she only did 1 click each time it was her turn. She still got pie in her face, though! 🙂

This game is very basic, but oh so hilarious. It is the PERFECT choice for family gatherings over the holidays. Because the game is so popular, it’s tricky to find right now. I saw some on Amazon just yesterday for the reasonable price of $14.99, but they seem to be priced higher right now (Amazon prices fluctuate throughout the day). Hasbro also sells them, but they seem to be sold out at the moment.

You may want to try local brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target. This is one not to miss. We are going to play it several more times during winter break, for sure!

My Top Toy Pick for 2015: Dash & Dot

November 25, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · Leave a Comment

Dash & Dot provided for review purposes. I fell in love with these robots all on my own, though.

Friends, today I’m SO excited to show you the toy that I’ve been dreaming about ever since I was a little kid. I want you to meet your kid’s first robot friends, Dash & Dot.

Dash & Dot are from Wonder Workshop, and they are programmable robots that your child can play with and learn coding with all at once. Dash & Dot work with the help of a few different (free) apps you can download from the Wonder Workshop website (they work on phones but I recommend using a tablet so you have more room to play). I’ll go over the apps in a bit more detail briefly, but for now I want to emphasize that Dash & Dot are ready to play pretty much right out of the box. They make adorable little sounds and offer a “hello” greeting when you turn them on, and I can tell you that this “sign of life” from the robots as soon as they came on had my 2 girls hooked and wanting to play. It also earned them instant cuddles. 🙂

Our robots did have to get plugged in immediately, not because they were out of energy, but rather because updates had been made to the program since they had been packaged. I took that as a very good sign, because updates mean improvements!

So to get started with either robot, the app I would choose first is Go. This app gives you a basic feel for some of the fun things each robot can do, like different fun sounds or color changes. I think it’s a great app for younger children and a great warm up app for the older ones.

Path is the app that my kids seem to want to play with constantly, though. In this app, you start to build some programming for your robot through a series of challenges. Dash is perhaps the most fun with this app because Dash is the robot that moves. The challenges seem to build on one another so that the learning continues in the midst of all the fun.

I think one of my favorite moments to witness using this app was when my oldest daughter had to build a program to make Dash take 3 right turns. Once she got it figured out and successfully ran the program, Dash concluded his path by shouting, “All right!” He celebrated her success, and he also made a joke. Darah instantly got it and fell into stitches on the floor. That’s just one example of the truly thoughtful design behind Dash & Dot.

We are still pretty new to Dash & Dot, so we haven’t yet spent much time looking at a third app called Blockly, but my husband checked it out and seems really pumped about it. This app seems geared for an older set (ages 8 and up) and gets even more into the details of programming. It sounds as though you can really start to get your robots to do some more sophisticated actions, which is really cool!

Another thing I’m really loving about Dash & Dot is that this is a toy that my children want to play with together. They don’t always want to play the same things since they are almost 3 years apart in age, but they both love these robots. I think Dash & Dot are actually best when played with in a group setting of some sort, be it with a sibling, a friend or a parent, because as you play more and more, you will get into some problem solving issues, and it’s great to have more than one mind working out a problem together!

The listed ideal age recommendation for Dash & Dot is 5 and up, and I think that’s accurate, unless you have a younger child with an older sibling like we do, and in that case, the younger child can certainly play, too! My little one was drawing paths and running simple programs for Dash on the very first night we had him!

You can purchase Dash and Dot as a combo set for $199.95, or you can order them separately (Dot is $49.99 and Dash is $149.99). Dash is the one that moves about, and I definitely saw the kids playing the most with that robot. But when I asked Darah which robot she liked the best, she said, “Dot!” and I when I asked why she said, “Well you know, Dot can’t move around mom, but that doesn’t stop her from being awesome. She can do really cool stuff!” And right she is. Still, I would highly recommend buying the pair because they are so very much fun together (they give kisses! True story!).

So there it is, friends. This is my very top toy recommendations for kids 5 and up this year. Dash & Dot rock my world. They going to teach me about coding, too! #neverstoplearning

Oribel Portaplay Convertible Activity Center (It Grows With Your Child!)

November 25, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · Leave a Comment

My sister Laura from Southern Made Simple has a FANTASTIC activity center to show you today. Anyone out there who is expecting or who has an infant should definitely check this out. I know my girls would have loved this when they were babies and would still be using it now! You’ll have to read the review for yourself to understand how in the world older kids could still get use out of it. 😉

Edit: Don’t miss the AWESOME product update at the end of the post!

Before I had my daughter, I was warned by other parents that my baby would grow faster than the blink of an eye. They would tell me to savor every newborn moment because those moments wouldn’t last for long, and that babies most certainly don’t keep. I don’t want to say that I ignored people when they said things like that, but I typically chose not to really listen. Frankly, it just sounded depressing to me, and a hormonal depressed pregnant lady probably isn’t a good thing!

And then I had my beautiful baby girl. And she was a newborn for what seemed to be all of two days. And now? She’s 6 months old, crawling all over the place, is VERY vocal (especially when we are feeding her solids..she’s not a fan), and she’s into everything. Why didn’t anyone tell me that they grow SO fast? Seriously. Somebody could’ve at least warned me! 😉

All that is to say that babies really do grow and develop so quickly, especially during their first year. Each time I have had to pack and put away her clothing she’s outgrown, I’m amazed at all of the things she didn’t even have time to wear. I’ve even gone through and found a few of her toys that she seems to have outgrown because she has become too advanced for them. Most of them she hardly even got to look at!

Luckily, the folks at Oribel had the fact that babies grow very quickly in mind when they created the Portaplay convertible activity center. This play table has been a huge hit with my daughter and me since we took it out of the package! It can be used as a fabulous little activity center for babies 5 to 12 months, and then easily transforms to a multi-purpose play table that can be used for children up to 5 years old. I really appreciate that this is something that will grow with my child. I won’t have to put it away with her baby toys (and ugly cry while doing it) because she’ll definitely be playing with this as she gets older and changes developmentally. Hooray for functionality!

The Portaplay came very neatly packaged and was insanely easy to put together. That’s really saying something in my opinion, because I typically skip out on putting things like this together and make my husband do it because I just know I’ll get frustrated with it. Fortunately that wasn’t the case at all! Once you get the table itself out and the leg height adjusted properly, you simply click the 5 learning toys and the swivel seat into place.

They’re really easy to snap in, and they stay put nicely so that a baby or toddler could not pop them off on their own. When you get ready to transition the activity center into a toddler play table, you can snap out the seat and play toys and put the flat plugs and wooden center piece into place with ease. It took me roughly 3 minutes to transform the play center into a table, and I had no hiccups or issues along the way! The only thing that I feel it is missing is a locking system for the wooden center piece for the table. It just sits in place, and I feel that it would be pretty easy for a curious 3 or 4 year old to take out and play with.

We currently have the activity table positioned at the lowest leg level for my daughter. Her feet don’t quite reach the bottom yet, so we stuck a little board underneath so she could stand properly. My daughter is absolutely on the petite side compared to other 6 month old children, so I feel that most other babies probably wouldn’t have much trouble reaching the floor.

From the moment that I sat her into the swivel seat of the activity center, she lit up like a light with excitement. She went straight to work playing and gnawing on the learning toys. She also thought it was so much fun to spin around from toy to toy with ease. Since she’s teething, she really liked one of the toys in particular:

Each of the learning toys encourages play in a different way and helps stimulate all five senses. The toys help develop hand-eye coordination, fine and gross motor skills, and self awareness. They’re also easily washable, too! Just rinse with a little soapy water and pat dry. This is great since I have a little drool monster on my hands!

My daughter has really been enjoying playing and exploring with the new Oribel Portaplay activity center. Before long, we’ll be transitioning it into a toddler play table. I don’t want to think about that just yet, but I am so glad that Oribel had growing babies in mind and created a play station that will grow with them.

Have I mentioned how great the Portaplay is yet? It’s pretty great, you guys. In fact, it’s SO great, it won 7 awards in 2015 alone, including the 2015 Kids Product of the Year from Creative Child Magazine. So cool! You can purchase the Portaplay activity center for just $149 from their website or from select retailers. They also have a few other really great products and will be releasing a super fabulous high chair in the very near future! I look forward to seeing the innovative children’s products that Oribel comes out with soon!

Update:

Big news from Oribel! I just got word that two brand new accessories are being released soon that will enhance play time with the already fabulous Portaplay system! Children will now be able to take a break from standing with the new Portaplay Child Stools, which are going to pair nicely with the new Portaplay Art Paper Roll Dispenser. Talk about a match made in heaven!

My daughter continues to play with the Portaplay every single day. I was so pumped to hear about these new attachments, because just a few days ago I caught myself wishing she could sit down while she plays at the table. She is new to walking, so her little legs get tired easily. I should have known that the brilliant minds at Oribel were already on the ball with that! The paper dispenser is also going to be perfect for those little budding artists who love to use their imagination and get creative. It even locks into place so it can’t roll off the table. Again, the folks at Oribel are really on top of their stuff!

Oribel is offering a special discount code for those that may be interested in pre-ordering these amazing new attachments. Be sure to check out the details below and check back soon to see a full review these sweet new products!

Promo code: Oribel15 – gets you 15% off your entire order. Sweet!

Details:

Only available on US site
Only available for PortaPlay and accessories
Not available with other promotion
Expires on May 10, 2016

Ozobot Review: Introduction to Coding for Kids for Under $50!

November 23, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · 1 Comment

Thanks to Ozobot for the review product. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

I recently read that 65% of the jobs that people who are currently children will have don’t even exist yet. Say what?!?! It’s just a tad overwhelming to think about how in the world to prepare our kids for work that hasn’t even been created yet.

But one thing I do feel confident about is that it is critical for our children to understand how technology works. I’m not talking about how to find Netflix on the iPad, either. I’m talking about having a basic understanding of what goes on inside a computer so that it can play Netflix in the first place, or run the game you like to play. I’m talking about coding.

I think this is a foundational language (yes, language!) that today’s children need to learn in order to be better prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. Will computers still run the same way that they do now in 15 years? Most likely not, but I know that when I was growing up, understanding how to play on an Apple IIe was a gateway for me to feel comfortable on a Dell and an iMac and beyond. The same is true for our kids. Knowing the basic language of computers will make them more comfortable to adapt and thrive as technology shifts and changes.

So how do you help a young child learn how to code? There are actually a surprisingly large number of options out there, and I’ll be highlighting a few of them this holiday season. I think perhaps the most budget-friendly option I found (that is amazing…there are other budget-friendly options that don’t wow me) is the Ozobot. You can get an Ozobot Starter Pack for $49.99.

The recommended minimum age for this awesome little robot is 6. Obviously you would need to make a judgment call based on your own child’s interests. After playing around with it a while myself (during which time I learned quite a bit, which was fun!), I think it’s going to be perfect for my oldest in about 8 months, when she turns 7.

You can find this adorable, customizeable, tiny robot at places like Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us and Amazon. Curious how it works? Well, it’s coding language is color-based! It comes with a booklet that shows you the color sequences that you can use to give the robot different instructions. Little ones can use some of the provided materials to create a course for the ozobot to run on, or they can draw their own (markers are included). They can also use a tablet and the free Ozobot app to play more fun games!

The starter pack comes with over 20 activities for your ozobot to perform, as well as code on reusable stickers and ozobot skins with sticker sheets so you can create a customized look for your bot. A USB charging cable is also included.

What an amazing, budget-friendly option for parents who want to get their kids starting with the world of coding. I’m really impressed with this product, and I’m looking forward to learning right alongside my kids! To the future!!!

The Best STEM Game I’ve Found: Magic School Bus Science Explosion

November 22, 2015 · by Tiffany Merritt · Leave a Comment

Special thanks to The Young Scientists Club for sending this game our way for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own, as always.

This week we started playing a new game, The Magic School Bust Science Explosion game, and it really wowed us! The content could not keep the attention of my 3-year-old (nor is it intended to) but she did stick around thanks to the promise of an erupting volcano! 🙂

There are actually two games included (a different board is on each side!) and you use the same playing cards but in a different way for the 2 games. We played the side that required you to collect different cards that matched the category card you had (for example, famous scientists, or weather). Each card you collect has really great information on it, without being too overwhelming.

As you collect cards, you get to move around the board and add baking soda to your beaker. After you collect 5 cards in a category, you get to cause the volanic eruption!

I’m totally adding food coloring to the vinegar next time to increase the dramatic effect. 🙂

You can play with 2 players or with 4 players, and I think in the future I’ll reserve this game for a time when my oldest and I can play just the two of us. With the 3-year-old otherwise entertained, we can spend more time exploring the great information cards and learning while we play.

After seeing the game for myself, I’m not surprised that this game has one awards from Parents’ Choice, Oppenheim Toy Portfolio and Creative Child. I think it is absolutely perfect for ages 6-9 (that’s my own age range, not the official one!) and it really does foster learning scientific concepts all while having fun. Every kid will want to be the one to make that volcano explode, and will keep playing the game until that happens. This game retails for $29.99.