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 
mixing potions in pots in the backyard with my siblings and friends… some of those concoctions were pretty foul-smelling…
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I had this older brother type character in my life, a boy four years older than me who was my parents’ best friends’ son. We both went to this private school about 20 miles away and had a long bus ride together every day. When his 8th grade class read The Hobbit, he’d read it to me on the bus every morning and evening.
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One of my favorite memories: my grandma making picnic lunches for the three of us grandkids, putting them in the special picnic basket, gathering our favorite books and hiking us out to the front lawn to lay on a blanket and look up through the leaves while she read us our stories, complete with voice changes 🙂
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Taking a cross-country road trip with my entire family (mom, dad, me, and three younger siblings) in an old-school station wagon and being able to lay down in the back (which was covered in astroturf) without a seatbelt!
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I actually have several but the very first one that popped into my head was putting on plays with my cousins at Christmas. I have 15 first cousins on one side of my family and one year, we got creative and did “Alice in Funky Land” – our own twist on Alice in Wonderland. We still have the pictures to prove it.
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following my big brother around, doing anything he told me too…still do today! 🙂
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Whenever we’d visit with my grandparents, my grandfather and I would first have a lunch of pears and cottage cheese. I would then sit on his lap and we’d draw cartoon faces of Dick Tracy over and over again on countless pieces of notebook paper.
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I am six and my cousin Jimmy is seven. We are playing in the street just before sunset. My Uncle Don comes out of the house, puffs out his beer belly until it ID rock hard and tells us to punch him as hard as we can. He closes his eyes. I take a running leap at him, punch him so hard I think I’ve broken my hand. Uncle Don doesn’t budge. As I hunch over and blow on my fingers, he opens one eye and grins like a cat. “go ahead and hit me whenever you’re ready, kiddo” he tells me. Jimmy and I spend the rest of the summer punching pillows, car seats, couch cushions, mattresses, readying for a rematch.
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hmm it would have to be one of me and my little brother. we lived with my grandparents for a year when we were little and when we’d go out for walks my brother would beg my grandma to tell anyone we’d meet that he was my twin sister. 🙂 Makes me smile every time I remember that.
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Probably going to Mardi Gras parades with my family every year!
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Climbing to the tippy tippy top of the trees in whatever yard I happened to have.
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As a kid growing up in Arizona it was always exciting to go to that first spring training baseball game of the year.
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Parents were in the Peace Corps, so my first grade years were spent in Samoa. Sweet memories of beaches so beautiful that I’m spoiled forever. Swimming with my friends in water so clear it felt you were flying. Best place in the world when you’re 7.
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Eating watermelon while in the pool, lips blue from staying in too long, skin sunburnt.
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Food is such an integral part of our family. One of my fondest memories is heading over to Chinatown on Sunday nights. We usually visited the same restaurant and were always greeted by our good friend Ed the host. The sight of wood paneled walls, faded paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling plus the scent of Hong Kong Steak and shrimp in lobster sauce always brought a smile to my face. I would sit next to my dad as he sipped his umbrella decorated mai-tais while I enjoyed my chocolate ice cream and almond cookie for dessert. Both Mom and Dad have passed but the kids still keep up the tradition.
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I was riding our stallion Speckle Joe in a horse ring in front of a crowd of people. Couldn’t have been more than six years old and I was a little scared. Somebody trotted a mare in and the horse reared up High Ho Silver style! I held on and he trotted over to the mares but I kept my composure and more importantly my seat. My dad came in and rescued me off the horse but I was so dazed and pleased with myself that after getting out of the ring I walked too close behind another horse and got kicked square in the chest. Knocked my off my feet. Still, it didn’t matter because I felt like the lone ranger!
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Favorite childhood memory – my grandmother transformed the empty lot beside our house into some wild forest/garden. Under one of the trees was what I thought to be a carpet of white flowers. Turns out they were all butterflies. Magical.
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My favorite childhood memory: Exploring the gully behind my house– one time we came across a ninja star. Awesome to a 9-year-old.
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My favorite memory is pushing my brother around the house in my barbie motor home. 🙂
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A favorite childhood memory of mine is going to our small-town coffee shop in the mornings with my grandpa!
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My favorite childhood memory was harder to come up with than I anticipated. My parents are divorced and every Wednesday my Dad would pick me up from school and we would spend the afternoon and evening together. We would go to the book store and he would let me pick out a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, we’d have pizza, and we almost always split a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Those were the best afternoons.
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The memory that came to mind is playing “grocery store” on my grandma’s steps with old yogurt containers and quaker oat boxes. Yay for reusing!
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My grandmother would make me pikelets for dinner, every school holidays. She always wanted to adopt me … I really wish she had.
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Wow…love that leaf puzzle and the flashcards! Favorite memory…hmmm, so many! How bout a not so favorite, but seared into my mind memory. Wetting my pants in the kindergarten because my mom dressed me in a baby blue jumpsuit with a rainbow on the front…said jumpsuit buttoned up in the BACK! How can a 5 year old get that thing off to go pee!? Well, I was sent to the principles office and the principle actually drove me home and made me sit on a plastic bag. Totally humiliating! Ok, favorite memory…summers spent with my grandparents who treated me like a princess every day and never made me sit on a plastic bag!
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A favorite childhood memory is spending summers on the water, and swimming all day, every day, and fishing for crabs and shrimps in the ‘dry’ hours.
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puddle jumping with mom
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one of my favorite childhood memories was to pick vegetables in our family garden with my mom or snap beans with my grandparents every summer & pretend i was a real country girl!
i can’t wait to make memories with my little one, who’ll be here in september!
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Favorite memory: Lazy Sunday mornings with homemade pancakes, fresh grapefruit juice, using both arms to wrangle the newspaper comics. Sun streaming through the windows.
Yes.
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One of my favorite memories is of reading the Anne of Green Gables series outside on the lawn during the summer.
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My sister Laura and I used to listen to my mom’s stories of how her mom and dad gave them real baby chicks on Easter; the very idea was so magical to our little suburban minds that we decided to recreate that magic for our mom one Easter, when we were about 4 and 6. We took an egg from the fridge (you can see where this is going), wrapped it gently in toliet paper, set it in a Tupperware, and placed it on a very high shelf in the living room to “incubate”. Then we forgot about it. For a few weeks. Needless to say, the smell drew my mom’s attention and it took her a while to figure out what the culprit was. I daresay she was touched!
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We had a weeping willow tree in the front yard that I loved. I liked to sit next to the trunk and watch the houses and cars get broken up and divided by the swaying branches and pretend that no one could see me through the curtain of leaves. Then I’d walk from the trunk to the edge of the branches slowly and carefully trying not to let any of them touch me. I also made hundreds of tiny wreaths from the thin branches and linked them into chains that I’d hang around the house. I still love weeping willows.
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I have lots of favorite memories, but the best were traditions I hope to continue with my little ones: making doll clothes from old cloth napkins with my Nana and giving toys to the fire department each Christmas to remind us how fortunate we were and how others were in need…
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too many to narrow down to just one!
but…we have gone to the oregon coast for a week each summer for as long as i can remember. my sister and i would look forward to that week as we’d get to hang out with our cousins closest in age. i have a great memory of all of us sitting on the beach house porch after dinner, in our night shirts, having an epic watermelon seed spitting contest. incredible fun!
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One of my favorites is a day during the summer of ’99. I was at summer camp, and our cabin went to Hanauma Bay, and played a game where we got into a circle, locked our arms around the girls next to us and slowly moved into a tighter and tighter circle until we were hip to hip with no space between girls. Then we’d count how many fish we caught in our circle. Our record that day was 12. Giggly girls, playing in the ocean. That day was sweet.
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These are all lovely! I am going to buy that leaf puzzle ASAP!
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i love reading all these comments.
one of my favorite memories is baking cookies with my grandfather, a retired baker, on the big wooden table in my grandparents’ kitchen. i think that’s a favorite memory of all his grandkids…
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I loved when my mom let me have the run of the kitchen when I was about 8 yrs. old and I would make “concoctions.” That meant throwing a little of this & a little of that into a bowl & then baking it to see what happened. Science lessons through cooking! Are 8 yr olds allowed in the kitchen by themselves these days?
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Sleepovers at my grandparents and then building stuff in the workshop with my poppop.
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Dress up, make believe and tree climbing were some of my favorite things to do. i used to spend hours and hours dressing up, going up in trees while dressed up, and either singing disney songs or playing pirates, goonies, swiss family robinson.
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the first that came to mind was my sister being hung upside down from a rip in her snowpants IN A BUSH. hilarious. it was memorable for the hilarity, and for the fact that she ripped her pants, and as our family had little money, that was a big “uh oh!”.
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picking strawberries with my mom in our backyard!
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My favorite childhood memory is having a tea party with my cousin on the soft bed of needles beneath the two hemlock trees in my grandparents’ back yard. After we dusted off, it was straight back into the pool for us.
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I remember swinging on my swingset and making up songs. Life was so easy then.
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I can’t single out one favorite memory, but the letter cards immediately reminded me of first grade. About once a month, we had “pudding spelling,” where every one got a plate of chocolate pudding to “write” in. It was great fun.
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My favorite childhood memory is my father rounding up all of the neighbor kids, throwing us in the back of the suburban and taking us all for ice cream on a summer day.
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weekends at my grandmother’s farm house, and her amazing delicious “teddy bear” pancakes decorated with chocolate chip eyes and buttons. The abundant sunny days, large blooming trees, and the bright green painted porch and wood swing – the days were certainly longer then…
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One of my favorite memories is also my oldest: I’m running through some very tall grass (taller than me) after my aunt’s cat. I remember wanting to pull that cat’s tail SO MUCH! I never caught it. Cats are fast…
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There are so many! One of my favorites is sledding down the hill in our backyard. I grew up in Vermont so playing out in the snow was a must and having my very own hill made it extra fun!
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My favorite time was spent on my Nana and Papa’s Houseboat in the middle of the lake. We would swim, fish, and sleep like babies on that rocking boat.
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Having just lost my Dad in April of last year, most of my most treasured memories are those which he is a part of. He coached me in softball, pushed me on the swings, cooked hot dogs on the grill. Insignificant flashes of little things, but aren’t those what add up to the best memories?
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