Hank’s school had an auction benefit a little while ago, and I asked some Internet friends for donations. As a thank you to the folks who donated, I thought I’d do some giveaways here as well.
Wee Wood of the Month Club from Little Alouette
These pretty wooden toys and teethers feel good in the hand, encourage imaginative play, and aren’t finished with paint or varnish that will make your baby ill. Bonus. Some toys are unfinished, others finished only with a light coat of organic flax seed oil, so all the toys are utterly chewable.
Strongman from Dria Peterson
Dria Peterson’s handmade strongman protects your little one from nightmares, and encourages him or her to hang out with carnies.
Happy Trails Felt Doll Journal from Suzy Ultman
If you kept a journal as a kid, you know the pleasure of paging back through your gift wishlists, childhood heartbreaks, and lemonade stand earnings. This diary doesn’t have a lock, which saves parents the trouble of picking it.
Hand-Knit Pony from Woolies
This tiny hand-knit pony is just right for chubby little fists. Twice the appeal of My Little Pony, with none of the offgassing.
Play Scarves from Birch Leaf Designs
Simple play scarves to use as capes, forts, or baby doll blankets.
A Leaf Puzzle from Just Hatched
This handmade wooden puzzle has the names of the tree behind each corresponding leaf. Yeah. Your kid is gonna be smarter than you.
Letter Flashcards from Pollywog Learning Products
Tactile letter flashcards are made to help little ones trace the letters with their fingers. The letters are fashioned from sandpaper with a starting-point dot on each. Literacy! Hells yes.
Please leave a comment with your favorite childhood memory to enter, and please only enter once. I’ll announce the winner on Monday. Tune in next week for a science toys giveaway, and big thanks to all the artists and merchants for their donations.
Mighty Girl 
When I was four, I declared what I would be moving to New York in a few years. (When my sister would be in college, learning to be an opera singer. She went to closer school and studied English.) I would spend my days eating pizza with the Ninja Turtles and hanging out with Levar Burton. (We would discuss books, pizza, and Star Trek.) My family smiled, but didn’t laugh, and said that sounded like a great plan. Twenty years later I moved to New York, and I eat a lot of pizza.
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One of my favorite memories from childhood is of my mother reading to my sister and me. She would push our twin beds together and lay on the crack between them while she read to us.
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Playing with my twin sister Katie at our friend Priscilla’s pig farm. Dusty haylofts…perfect. I want to befriend some farmers so my kids can have the same experience…
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Disneyland for my father’s company picnic. (Lockheed)
When I moved to Portland I was shocked that not everyone went to Disneyland once a year
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“Painting” with water on the sidewalk with my best friend Amy after a summer rainstorm, and then roller skate racing around the block with the big kids.
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Summer on the Canadian prairies means long daylight hours until well after 10 o’clock. But my siblings and I would have to go to bed at the normal 8pm. But with the sunshine pouring in our windows, this usually meant that we wouldn’t actually go to sleep until much later.
When my sister and I shared a room and there was no chance we’d be falling asleep anytime soon, I remember wrapping our bed covers around ourselves into a dress with a train (that was tucked into the ends of the bed), and then we would pantomime walking around like princesses.
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We lived in Hong Kong when I was growing up and we would rent a junk with a bunch of other families and spend every other Saturday at one of the different beach islands that dot the bay. I looked forward to it every summer.
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I think my favorite childhood memory is my mother playing records on Sunday mornings. There were some artists that were only ever played on Sundays, and others that were in regular rotation, but something about a morning filled with Judy Collins, The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, etc. set a tone for the day that felt as sacred as could be for our non-church-going family.
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I remember asking my mom when my birthday was – all year round, of course – and her response was “when the leaves are on the trees.” I still wait for that day now 🙂
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My favorite childhood memory is the fishtank next to my crib. My parent used it as a psuedo-nightlight, the gurgling and warmth and buzzing pump and darting fish would lull me to sleep every night. So much better than the Fisher Price aquarium crib toy I had in my son’s crib.
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I remember the clickity clack of my metal-wheeled roller skates going over the cracks in the sidewalk at my grandparents’ house. We didn’t have sidewalks at our house, so it was extra awesome.
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The summer we spent in Alfred, New York, picking black raspberries and buying stickers (I got an allowance for the first time!) and getting lunch in cafeterias and luncheonettes. That summer I was stung by a bee, which is not my favorite part but it does stand out a bit. Even more stand-out is the day we went to a hot air balloon launch and saw hundred of balloons in the sky. Amazing.
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My mom usually combed my really long hair and it hurt so bad. One night my dad brushed it all out and told me stories. It was magical.
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exploring the creek near my house with my best friend. there were toads and vines and a little plank of wood to cross the little stream. we named it ‘sathia’. i don’t remember why.
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Random breakouts of dance in the kitchen with my parents and siblings
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Eating drippy popsicles after playing in the plastic pool and catching fireflies out in the humid night before snuggling down in cool sheets.
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I know this is nerdy, but I loved going to library and bringing home books for the week.
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Exploring the fields behind my house, climbing barbed wire fences and feeding the neighbor’s horses Quaker oats.
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Camping and going on all the adventures kids drum up for camping trips. Since he was 6, I’ve taken my son on a camping trip every summer. He’s been on 5 years worth of camping trips and it’s clear that his memories of the trips are just as happy as mine.
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I went with my grandfather to the neighboring farm one day for a visit. One of their cats had had kittens and I spent lots of time playing with them. They were all tabbies but one had a black dot on his nose. I begged my grandparents to let me keep him and they did. Tigger came home with me to their house. He was fabulous.
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eating sandy lollypops on the beach with my cousins
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Speaking of offgassing and My Little Ponies, one of my favorite childhood memories is actually their plastic smell. I had a Wuzzles figurine (Hoppopotamus) that smelled the same way and every now and then I get a whiff of that from something else and it brings me right back. Seriously.
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My mom used to make homemade playdough and it would start off so warm and smell kind of salty. I made it with my son recently and it made me feel like a kid again. Also, dancing around the living room with my dad to Mozart.
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We four kids used to have to wait outside for our dad to pick us up on Visitation Sundays, so my mom wouldn’t have to see him. Lots of times he would be very late, so to pass the time my older sister would make up songs and coax us to sing them until we were howling with laughter. Um. Rereading that, it doesn’t sound very cheerful, does it? But it really is a very fond memory.
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What a neat giveaway! My favorite childhood memory is my dad taking my sisters and me swimming on Tuesday nights during the summer, and then to Dairy Queen after. We had so much fun!
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We took a family vacation down Skyline Drive and saw some amazing things, most memorably George Washington’s outdoor bathtub. I was cramped in the back of a pick-up truck (with a cap on it) with my two brothers. It was great!
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My favorite childhood memory is that of scouring the neighborhood, with my friends, for “playhouse” building supplies. Bean poles, used fencing, lawn bags and bamboo were used to build ramshackle huts that were more fun to build than to play in….now I see in it a connection to my art-making process.
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Every year for my birthday I asked for treasure hunts for my party. My Dad would create them, and the best was the year that each clue had a puzzle piece that when assembled made a map to the treasure 🙂
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My next-door neighbor and I used to pretend that the back of her garage was an island. The “island” consisted of a clothesline, trampoline and large pile of discarded bricks, but childhood imagination abounded.
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My best friend and I used to take all of my dollhouse furniture and put it into the smallest amount of space possible and pretend that the dolls were poor and had to live in this tiny house with wall to wall furniture. I think there were also plenty of teen pregnancies and after school special situations that happened to this poor dollhouse family. I don’t know why we thought this was such a great game but it helps me when my kids are being weird to remember that games don’t have to make sense to be fun.
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What beautiful giveaways!
I’d have to say that my favorite childhood memory is hanging out with my very Cajun grandmother. I grew up in south Louisiana, and my grandmother was the white shrimp boot-wearing type. She would get the pirogue out and let us sit in it in the yard and practice fishing. She even had real hooks on the fishing poles, so sometimes we’d snag a tomato plant or a clump of grass. My grandmother had no rules: she threw away toothpaste caps and slept in her clothes. My mom was the type that kept the plastic on things. I loved being so free because it always felt like I was getting away with something huge.
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A favorite childhood memory was triggered looking at these fabulous toys. My mom really values handmade gifts and cards. Growing up she made me a special homemade toy for each birthday and Christmas. When I was 4 I received “Dancing Tom”-a cloth doll that she had sewn that was just my height! His hands had velcro on them so I could connect them around my waist and his feet had loops of elastic on them so I could put them around my ankles. Tom and I could dance and dance and dance! I love that I will have these toys forever and be able to pass them on to my children.
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Favorite childhood memory would have to be swimming in the creek across the street from my house. Me and my friend would play Baywatch, and pretend to save each other. (what we were doing watching Baywatch at that age? lol, heavens knows!)
These are all so adorable! I’d love to win!
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I loved lurking around gatherings of my big Italian-American family… eating amazing food, eavesdropping on all the gossip, watching the great-uncles play bocce and argue. It was great fun.
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The day I graduated from kindergarten and got a kitten. Yes. The same day.
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When my three sisters and I made a boat out of a kiddie pool and rowed it down the ditch with a broom for a paddle when the creek by our house flooded. Also, dressing ourselves in sheets and playing ‘poor’ for hours on end.
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When there were awesome celestial events my dad would wake me up in the middle of the night and we’d walk down to a nearby golf course with a great view of the night sky and watch shooting stars, comets or eclipses. Hands down the best memories of my childhood.
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Running through the sheets that my mom would hang to dry outside on Saturdays. That smell just cannot be duplicated.
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My favorite childhood memory is playing in the woods with my brother in our “Secret City.” We build a teepee out there, and only we knew where it was. We kept things in tins in the teepee…flashlight, matches, and those pink mints that were popular at grandparents’ houses. So much fun.
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Making up dance routines to pop songs in my basement and front lawn with other kids in my neighbourhood. I really thought I would be a pop star someday!
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Parents aren’t allowed to send medicine to school with their Kindergarteners, for very good reasons. Such as: if your kid is sick enough to really need that medicine, s/he is probably sick enough to stay home. Whatever. When I was well enough to go to school, but still a little cough-y, my mom would put delicious, grape flavor cough medicine in my thermos of milk. It tasted kind of weird, and I’m sure drinking the cough syrup diluted in that much milk had no medical effect on my actual cough. But. It was our little secret, and it made me feel so loved and secure, that my mom was so bad-ass, and cared about me enough to break the rules.
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Running wild in my grandparent’s backyard with my sister and cousin Ben. We had a clubhouse and road my granddfather’s rider mower.
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My dad and I are on the ski lift, he weighting it heavily in his direction. But we’re swinging along, in that silence. And he always has a Snickers bar (usually verboten, but not on vacation), and, even though our noses are dripping and we’re high, high up—all is well.
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My favorite memory is sitting in my car with my Grandpa while my Grandma was shopping in the grocery store – and he was teaching me to read by helping me sound out the signs in the windows.
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One of my favorite memories is going with my neighbors in their row boat and suddenly getting rained on and waiting it out under a little bridge.
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Climbing up the hill behind my Bestemor’s house in Oslo. It was quite strenuous and when I got to the top I could wander in the forest. Once I found a little meadow/clearing. It was lovely. Now it is low income housing.
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When we’d drive for two days to visit my grandparents in North Carolina, and my grandmother would pull my sister and me close as soon as we were out of the car — sweaty bodies and all — and say, “Give me some sugar.”
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Favorite childhood memory? That’s tough! I’d have to say one of my faves is the Christmas my brother was born. I got all new doll furniture for my room and I couldn’t wait to put him in it! I’m sure my mom was just thrilled when I suggested we put the newborn in my tiny, white wooden high chair with hand painted roses.
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I used to live in the woods and when I played in the afternoon during blackberry season I would stuff myself full of fresh blackerries. Most of the time I’d be full by dinnertime but it was so hard to stop eating them.
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Putting a puzzle of the map of the United States together over and over again, racing my dad, until I knew where each state belonged before I knew their names.
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