Keeping it Fresh

We received our new Schleich display today and it is BEAUTIFUL!!Craig is our Schleich rep and he came out to help me put it together. One of my favorite low tech toys has always been a little plastic animal, and Schleich makes them the best. When I was a girl the only ones that were available to me were dinosaurs that had belonged to my dad. I wasn't into dinosaurs, but I spent hours with them forming family groups and enacting drama's large and small. Whether drought, starvation, or predators of unknown origins, survival was top on my list of things to play out. This kind of role playing is important to children learning how to relate to others, and how to interact with others. I can still conjure up the nurturing feelings I felt for my little dino family. One of the best things about these animals as opposed to dolls for this kind of modeling is that they are non-gender specific. Boys and girls alike enjoy playing with them. This makes them an ideal item for a family of mixed genders to collect. And, barring fire or a labrador retriever encounter, they will last for generations.

Community...and parks....

It's no secret. I love this community. As a mother, one of the things that I appreciate most is the park system. We spend a good portion of the year at various games and practices in Joe Dancer park. My dog and I are down there running the trails nearly every morning. The picture I posted was taken at the City Park, or the dragon park as all of the kids in my family call it. My dad was part of a community crew that built that play structure for the children of this community nearly twenty years ago. There were literally hundreds of people that donated money, time and tools to build it. I love that their grandchildren are playing on it now. With it's water feature, rock wall, skate park, etc. Discovery Meadows is the shiny new playground on the McMinnville park scene, but the city park is by far my favorite. It embodies so much of what makes McMinnville a great community to raise children in. First of all because it has been a gathering place for as long as McMinnville has been here. Secondly because it has that wonderful low tech wooden play structure that was built through community contributions and our volunteer spirit (not every community has that, it's special). Thirdly because it is at the center of our downtown and part of a walkable community with the library and pool right there. For my next blog I'll go on and on about some wonderful toy we have here at hopscotch (there are so many! we are receiving our Christmas inventory and every year I get so excited by it!) For today however, with summer drawn to a close and each sunny day feeling like a theft from the looming rainy season, I wanted to wax poetic one last time about summer days in the park.

Her Hearts Desire

This is a picture of Gracie Peak's birthday bin. A birthday bin is something we do here at hopscotch that is like a registry, but way cooler because the kids actually get to place their hearts desire into the bin. (the bin size also forces them to choose what they REALLY want, not everything in the store) I have come to look at them as little snapshots of the inner workings of a child at a certain point in time. Gracie is a very well rounded girl, she has her knight dress up stuff, her cupcake box, lots of charms for her charm bracelet, a sword, a huge sucker, the Klutz Guide to Immaturity, and a few other things. My kind of girl. What a child wants is a great insight into what is of value to them and who they are at any given time. I don't keep my children's report cards. I keep their Santa letters.
Wish lists and wants give insight into adult priorities also. I am a project girl, and with every project there are things that I intensely desire. When I look back through my notebooks, whether my want list included a spiral staircase, a Kubota tractor, a composting toilet, a milk cow, a herd of goats, a gambrel truss system, or a new point of sale system, offers great insight into who I was and what I was trying to accomplish at that point in my life. Many of these things I acquired, some of them (goats for instance) I am thankful I did not. That is another thing that is important to remember in these times of immediate and complete gratification. Sometimes the best thing you can give your child is to leave them yearning for that thing that is not appropriate for them or you can't afford. I have keen recollections of all the toys I wanted and never got. The memories of those longings are every bit as sweet as the memories of playing with the toys I did get. Open ended desire, longing, is vilified as lack of fulfillment, but sometimes the fantasy of what your life could be like with that shiny new thing is far more precious than the thing itself.

Beating the Heat!

Yeah, we all know about the pool, the water gun, the slip and slide and the river, but when temperatures get up above 100 degrees it doesn't prudent to spend any time in it at all. That is why this afternoon, my living room was full of teenagers making hemp bracelets and playing musical instruments. Curtains drawn, well insulated house, and big shade trees made it the perfect place to hole up. My kids learned to weave hemp using the Klutz Hemp Bracelet Book.We broke it out today to teach the other kids. Though the hemp and beads that came with it have long been used, we now have a tin full of various beads, spools of colored hemp, sinew, and beading thread. I have loved Klutz since my son was five and picked up the "How to Draw Marvel Comic Figures" book. Lived with it, drew and drew and moved on to draw more. I think that is what impresses me most about Klutz. We have lots of arts and crafts stuff in the store, but Klutz does more than provide an afternoon project. It gives children new skills. Whether it is embroidery, clay, beading, bracelets, drawing, potholders, quilting, or one of their other titles. They make project books that are based in teaching skills and give you all the components that you need to get started. I was a little worried when Klutz was purchased by Scholastic that some of the ingenuity would go out of the line, but I have been pleased to see more great titles hit the floor every year. Summer takes over and you kind of forget all of those quiet things you used to do when the rain was coming down. I am here to tell you, 100+ degrees is the perfect time to break them out again.

Summer Bounty

I am fortunate enough to have found a local farmer who will trade produce for toys. As I have found the time I have available to garden much less than it used to be this works out perfectly. They just dropped this bag of gorgeous produce at my door. As much as I think it's important to feed a child's mind and sense of adventure, I think it's doubly important to feed their bodies. Without a well fed brain and body a child can't use even the most vast resources well. One of the things I love about owning a specialty toy store is that most of the families who come through are really invested in their children. They feed them well, mind and body. One of the things I don't love is that it gives me an insulated view of the world and it is too easy to forget that this is not the way many children live their lives. There is so much garbage out there, and too often, children get a steady stream of McDonalds and television for sustenance. I guess I just want to put a shout out to all of you parents who are making conscientious decisions to feed your children body and mind. And also a shout out to Andre', Sheila, their three wonderful children and the bounty they drop at my door every week.

Change

When my kids were younger we had splattered so much paint and glue on our dining table, and gouged it with leather craft tools, that I suggested that we should divide it into five and each member of the family paint a section. That is the result in the picture there. We used it like that for years and it now hangs on the outside of the shop facing the deck. The family that created it has long since disappeared evolving into a new family with other priorities than those outlined on the table, and I do miss them, but not as much as I value who they have become. The elements are cracking the paint and the images get a little lighter every year but I am able to look at it regularly. One of these days it will be just a gouged up table top again and I will discard it and make way for new experiences and memories. We all keep our photos, our bits of paper, our writings, but most of the experiences of this life can only be archived for a very short time. Even our memory changes so what we think we have stored away is merely fantasy layered over our faulty perception of so called reality. Not much to cling to. As it should be, I say. We should no more hold to and hoard memories than we should old table tops. We can and should use them only as a catalyst for new experiences. We should break them out to freshen bonds that threaten to fray, to laugh and create new experiences, new memories while doing so. I don't know what this has to do with the toy store. It's just what was on my mind this morning as I sat on the deck, drinking coffee, looking at the table top, and that old rocker that Genna and I painted when I chose to bring my son home from the hospital rather than give him up for adoption (now there is a story worthy of a blog, but again having nothing to do with running a toy store.) Change can happen so fast these days. Especially with a house full of teenagers. For me it is somehow comforting to watch my world changing one flake of paint at a time.

Piece Work A Plenty

Ping, ping, ping. For kids growing up in Carlton in the 1970's and 80's, no sound could make you feel more despondent than the sound of those first few berries hitting an empty picking can. In my memory I see legions of us rubbing bleary eyes riding our bikes down the streets in the first light of dawn, grass still covered with dew. In reality, it was just all the kids I hung out with. We'd hit the fields hard and early because by the time the sun was high in the sky we wanted to have enough money to get into the Carlton pool and buy something at main street market. At night we'd lay out in our yards, or up in our beds with rows and rows of berries haunting our vision. The fields don't hire children anymore and though I can certainly see why (we threw and ate more berries than we weighed by far) it still makes me sad for the generations of American youth who are growing up without the availability of consistent piece work. When kids come into hopscotch with their own money I always ask them what they did to earn it. The answers are varied, birthday money, tooth fairy money, went potty in the toilet, good grades, cavity free dental visit, but the kids who just beam are the kids who have worked hard for those dollars. It means more to them because they did good work and received a wage for it. Our house is here in town, not a farm, but we have lots of fruiting trees and shrubs. First the strawberries come on, then the cherries, then the raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, blackberries, plums, apricots, pears, and finally apples. We pick and process as much of it as we can, and the kids are all required to help. My kids, my sisters kids, they all get paid a dollar for each Nancy's Yogurt container they pick full of blueberries. They also get to enjoy blueberry pancakes, muffins, pies and smoothies through the year, but that's just a fringe benefit. The real benefit goes to us as their parents because they have hard earned pocket money to learn to manage. We have blueberries in the freezer, and the corner store has a steady stream of customers with their own money jingling in their pockets.