Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents - want a great reusable gift idea for the little person in your life?  This gift arrives in the mail to the lucky recipient every month and we know kids love to recieve their own mail! Remember Chirp, chickaDEE, and Owl children’s magazine subscriptions? I still remember the excitement when my chickaDEE magazine would arrive.  I’ve purchased the Chirp magazine for my boys and the memories of this great little magazine came back.  The wonderful age appropriate jokes, games, and facts are very well written and really holds kids attention. My boys are now at the chickaDEE age and this magazine will be on their wish list for sure.  For the $30 price point, you can’t beat the fun, educational bundle of an ‘Owl Kids’ subscription.  Here’s what this month’s issues look like for Chirp, chickaDEE, and Owl from the Owl Kids site:

Chirp Magazine (Ages 3 to 6) This month’s Chirp is all about weather! Find out what makes thunder and lightning in Look & Learn, and keep track of the weather with Chirp’s handy pullout calendar. Rain or shine, you’ll have fun with this issue of Chirp! 

chickaDEE (Ages 6 to 9)  Burst into school with a great guide on how to make recess fun. Check out the 16 pages of cool puzzles and games to play! Meet Mish, Mash and Mush on the Mish Mash joke page. Also, learn how to pack a healthy lunch.

Enter to win this month’s contest at Mommy Footprint. The prize is a wonderful 3-tier stainless steel carrier - perfect for back-to-school or packing a lunch for work.  Read this article for contest details: Laptop Lunchbox Contest Ends. 3-Tier Carrier Contest Begins!

Want an awesome story that transitions your toddler our of reading the very basic ’see spot run’ type books?  I always assumed our preschool favorite Clay Boy, by Mirra Ginsburg, was only for ages 3-5, but I’m delighted to write that my 2 year old twins LOVE it.  They suffer from the inability to sit still for 5 minutes (like their mother), but they will sit happily to read this tale.  It is the perfect book to capture this age’s attention because there is aways something exciting happening and lot of action to keep your little one focused.  It has the same exciting build up like Three Billy Goat’s Gruff and uses word repetition so within a few times of first reading the book, your little one is chanting “More, I Want More!”

This book comes highly recommended from the preschool where my kids attend.  The story is the retelling of a Russian Folktale and it’s main characters are: Grandma, Grandpa, Clay Boy, and a golden goat.  Grandma and Grandpa make a boy out of clay to keep them company, but they aren’t prepared for Clay Boy’s appetite and soon he eats all the food in the house.  He continues to eat the village and all the people and animals in it.  Are you a little horrified? I was too the first time I read it, but the children LOVE it.  It has a very happy ending with the clever golden goat’s saving village and people.

I found this book on the Canadian Amazon site. That’s good news for Canadians….great prices too!

For US residents, the American Amazon site also carries this book. Here is the link for you to save shipping costs.

Want an easy way to educate your kids about the environment and ways to help replenish a precious resource …our trees?  Check out Eco-Libris. They are a wonderful green business that works with book readers, publishers, authors, bookstores and others in the book industry to balance out the paper used for books by planting trees. More than 20 million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the US alone. Eco-Libris aims to raise awareness to the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provide people and businesses with an affordable and easy way to do something about it: plant one tree for every book they read, sell or publish. Customers also receive a sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out saying “One tree planted for this book” and can later display these stickers on their books’ sleeves.  

Wouldn’t that be the perfect finishing touch on a book given as a gift or goodie bag item from a kid’s green birthday party? That is going the extra step to support reading and balancing out your love for books by having a tree planted to reverse the destruction caused to have it produced.
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Many children have fallen asleep listening to their parents reading the enlightened stories of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.  Dr. Seuss graduated from Dartmouth College in 1925 and then went on to Oxford University where he received a doctorate in literature. He wrote his first book in 1936 entitled, “And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.” He was turned down by 43 publishers before a friend of his agreed to publish it for him. As you may expect, it turned out to be a best seller.

The magic of Dr. Seuss is that his stories, along with being great fun, also carry with them powerful and relevant messages and lessons for children and adults alike. This is true for most of his books, but it is especially for the last book he ever wrote, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (Classic Seuss)” published in 1990.
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All I have to see is the cover of this book and my eyes start to mist because I can feel the imprints of my boys on my lap reading “Where the Wild Things Are“.  It’s a classic and is one of my favorite books for boys.  This would be a perfect gift for a 1 year old boy and they can grow into the story.  My 4 year old still gets new things out of reading this book.  Now he notices different features of the ‘wild things’ and excitedly echos the catch phrases…  “The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes…”

It’s a magical book between a mommy and her son as the underlying meaning (for me anyway) is it doesn’t matter where a boy goes in the world, they know they are special because of who loves them at home.  Max gives up being king of the wild things to return where someone loves him best of all (and that person is his mommy).