Toys for a Fantastic Cause

Every year, 300,000 American children must be rescued from perilous home environments—abuse, neglect, violence, trauma. When those children enter foster care, they often show up with little more than the clothes on their backs. Can you imagine how it feels to suddenly leave behind everything familiar without even your favorite blankie or even your toothbrush?

That’s exactly why the Toy Industry Foundation (TIF) and My Stuff Bags Foundation have teamed up to give distressed children a little comfort in the form of a blue duffel: a bag filled with toiletries, handmade blankets, clothing, and of course, a cuddly toy to ease the shock of the transition.

At this year’s fair, dozens of toy exhibitors are getting behind this cause by donating their toy floor samples—everything from Elmo and Barbie dolls to children’s books. “The children are extremely excited when they receive the bags,” says TIA Foundation Manger Amanda McDorman, who took part in last year’s distribution of toys to elementary school children. “Some of them just scream in shock, joy, and disbelief. The bag is a message that someone cares about them—and that’s exactly what a child needs to feel when he or she is in crisis.”

Look out for some fluorescent on the floor today: K.I.D.S. (Kids in Distressed Situations, Inc) volunteers, dressed in a blinding-orange T-shirt, will wander around the Jacob Javits Center booths, collecting the toys to be donated. Throughout 2009, the toys will be handed out to children of all ages, from infants to 18-year-olds; the duffel bags are gender- and age-appropriate. This May during National Foster Care month, My Stuff Bags Foundation and TIF will organize a special toy distribution.

And here’s the best part: You don’t have to be a Toy Fair participant to make a mega-difference in the life of a distraught kid. First of all, you can send some moula via the website mystuffbags.org (and yes, it’s tax-deductible). But even if you’re running a bit short on cash—and who isn’t these days?—you can donate new, non-edible, non-violent, and non-denominational items to My Stuff Bags. What kinds of things do people send? You name it—from crayons, books, and school supplies, to hand-held games, crafts and small photo albums.

Bonus if you happen to live or are planning to visit sunny Southern California, the volunteer center at My Stuff Bags could certainly use your help in stuffing the bags. Call 866-3MY-STUFF or visit www.mystuffbags.org for more information.

The Family That Plays Together: Games and Toys That Reconnect Us

There was a time when mom, pop, and the kiddos could spend eons gathered ’round a Monopoly board on a weekend night. That was then. In an age where most of us have more face time with our Blackberries than we do with our children, squeezing in even 4.2 minutes of eyeball-to-eyeball fun has become a Herculean feat.

Enter this year’s crop of toys—from the everyone-plays variety to the newest generation of board games—that are designed to bring families closer. When dad and former exec David Schoenberger wanted to re-connect with his kids, he invented a game entitled Family Matters ($24.99, for 2 to 6 players, ages 7 and up). “Families work harder than ever before and enjoy less quality time together,” Schoenberger says. “The familiarity past generations took for granted is now a distant dream with everyone so busy, distracted, and exhausted.”

Schoenberger’s 45-minute game uses a set of 120 cards to explore real-life situation and so-called “fake family crises”—for instance, each player pretends to be another person in the family while discussing, say, how the family has changed since a sick grandparent moved in to live. Another aspect of the game invo lves a “weekend wish,” in which players describe the activity they’d most like to do with the family. The included playbook allows parents to record their children’s weekend wishes and later use the ideas as fodder for planning a real-life outing.

This July, look out for a family-friendly update to the classic Lego collection: With the Builders of Tomorrow Set ($29.99, ages 4 and up), parents and kids receive a versatile collection of bricks—then, courtesy of a linked Website offering free step-by-step building instructions each month—they can continuously switch up their creations as a team. The site also features family stories, building challenges and contests, and a photo gallery for sharing creations.

If you want to shore up your children’s critical reasoning skills (sneakily, by all means ...), pick up the visual perception game that has toy critics and schoolteachers buzzing: Set ($12). Using 81 cards, players race to find three cards (out of 12) that form a set, based on color, shape, and shading. Once family game night is over, tweens and teens can continue the fun: The techie version of Set ($29.95) is a travel-worthy handheld that contains four levels of difficulty on a full-color LCD display screen.

Feeling a tad over the hill with all this high-tech business? Get back to the basics with a few recently-updated USAopoly (usaopoloy.com) ga mes that give a head nod to us old-school gamers. Check out Trivial Pursuit: The Beatles Collectors’ Edition ($39.95, available August 2009); for the first time, Beatles aficionados can test their knowledge of the band with 2,500 questions on topic such as history, music, and travels. Seinfeld junkies can get a fix with Monopoly Seinfeld Collectors’ Edition ($35.95, available in August 2009). The game features the characters of Jerry, Kramer, George and Elaine, and the game board includes locations that the sitcom’s fans will recognize: Jerry’s Apartment, Monk’s Restaurant, and the Soup Kitchen.

Finally, there’s my personal fave for LOL group fun: Telestrations, which does double duty as either a family or party game. Telestrations ($29.95, available in September 2009) keeps players guessing as they sketch a word they’re given and pass it along. Expect spontaneous giggling as players do their best to guess at others’ sketches. Look out, Pictionary: Telestrations has a real shot at becoming 2009’s party pick. Brownie points for the game’s creators: Since you can play as few or as many rounds of this game as you’d like, you can squeeze in a family laugh-fest in as little 15 minutes.

Tailoring Sans the Sewing Machine: A New Way for Girls to Play Dress-Up

For all the muttering in recent years about offering children gender-neutral toys, let’s face it: Most girls still like playing dress-up as much as most boys like playing with toys that go crash, boom, or ka-bang. In 2008 when seamstress Kari Kawa wanted to give her then-5-year-old daughter the same hours of unlimited creativity that a LEGO set provides her 7-year-old son, she got an idea: Why not offer children the opportunity to design personalized get-ups, starting with a pink-and-white polka dot dress form and dozens of vibrantly-colored swaths of fabric?

One year and several spools of thread later, Kari’s lightbulb moment has become one of the hottest new trends in girls’ dress-up. Through her company, Style Paige LLC, Kari created Shailie—an award-winning design kit that comes with mix-and-match sleeves, skirts, tops, sashes, and trims that can be attached to a dress form with Velcro fasteners, then worn around the house during playtime. You could call it a Project Runway for kids: Without needing a sewing machine or patterns (hold the applause, moms), your daughter can experiment with a DIY fashion line.

At the 2009 Toy Fair, Kari and her team turned their booth’s aisleway into a catwalk (by the way, you can swing by anytime and see them at booth 6323). On February 17, Kari invited two students from New York’s FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) to participate in a designer face-off. After gathering passers-by judged the final designs (onlookers voted by clapping most loudly for the designs they loved best), Kari ended the contest by squeezing into the winning designs and strutting down the makeshift runway to show off the creations.

Got a girl who’s a bit, um, chubby? With childhood obesity on the rise in this country, you’ve got gobs of company. Though Shailee is designed for average-sized girls between the ages of 5 and 13 (the dress form is actually based on an 8-year-old’s frame), fear not: The set’s expandable skirt, for instance, can fit a girl with a waist of up to 45 inches—oh, the wonders of Velcro. And even if your girl can’t manage to squeeze her booty into one of her own designs, Kari says that many Shailie lovers—particularly tweens, teens, and yes, even some women—simply enjoy testing out new looks on the dress form; some buy their own fabric to expand their wardrobe options. Oh, and one more thing: You can order in two sizes—Little Miss (ages 5-7) or Miss (ages 8 and up). The dresses in the Miss set are longer.

Nickel pinchers, brace yourselves: The Shailee starter kit retails for $255 (the set includes a dress form, a base outfit, a few skirts and a sash, and a sparkly top); additional clothing kits run betwee n $30 and $120. The owner, Kari, is showing mercy to our pocketbooks with a special offer she concocted right here at Toy Fair 2009: Cash-strapped parents can buy just the dress form for $150; or the base outfits can be purchased for $89. You might consider this a kind of layaway plan: first comes the form, then comes the fabric—and finally comes the chance for your kid to engage in a kazillion hours of creative fun.