LEGO City Advent Calendar 2008 – If you wait very much longer this cool advent calendar will be sold out for Christmas. This calendar has absolutely nothing to do with the holiday, but kids love to open up the little parts every day at breakfast, counting down the days ’till they have more stuff to open. Make sure to get a little plastic box as well to hold all the little tiny parts. Once the tiny pieces are assembled, they come apart and end up all over the house. Lego CASTLE Advent Calendar 2008 LEGO City Advent Calendar (2007)

Play-doh Magic Swirl is a fun toy for kids over four years old. Kids like the many forms you can use to make ice cream-like objects and have a lot of fun playing waiter for hours on end. My kids made up menus and served us ice creams over and over. The play-doh colors are vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, and something like sprinkles. The machine part is the lever that pushes the play-doh into a soft-serve swirl. Smaller devices to the side make it easy to make “sprinkles” and gloppy “whipped cream.” Dads, even, will enjoy playing with this for a few minutes since it’s pretty captivating how play-doh can be manipulated into miniature, yet “life-like” forms. Unfortunately,...

Sony Cyber-shot DSCW120MDG/P 7.2 MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom with Super Steady Shot $180 – Amazon I love this camera! We just got the DSCW 120 for our summer holiday and I was hoping it would work well and replace our five year-old DSC V1. The two cameras have several things in common: a Zeiss lens and many manual over-ride features, but the new camera is far smaller and easier to use. This is a great little camera and represents how far Sony has come in developing an interface that is easy to use. This is the first camera I’ve seen where an explanation of the icons shows up on-screen when you dial a selection. No more trying to remember what an icon of a tree or a mountain...

With just a few days left before dads’ day, here are a few suggestions for wine books you can pick up at the local bookstore or order quickly off Amazon. 1. Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Book 2008 – This is a classic little volume perfect for sneaky glances while out at a restaurant where you need a reminder on the best years for a French Burgundy. It has seviceable wine pairing suggestions and even a primer on wine glass selection. At $14.95, this is a good bet. 2. The World Atlas of Wine Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson – This is a good building block for a strong wine library, as are the following four books. 3. The WIne Bible – 19.95 paperback 4. Sotheby’s...

I just got done reading my four year old’s favorite book, Uncover a Shark by (David George Gordon. He LOVES this book, and while the cover says it’s for eight years old plus, he has memorized all the facts about the shark and was explaining to me features of the shark’s anatomy. This series is part book and part model, which he find really intriguing. So much so, that I felt like I was talking to a kid who would one day grow up to be a zoologist or other scientist. The book has all of sixteen pages, but each page also has a three-dimensional plastic part of the shark’s anatomy. The text is about the organ (liver, brain) or body part featured (teeth, skin). Peppered throughout...

If you haven’t found a father’s day gift yet for dad, here are few suggestions you can still get on-line that he might enjoy for father’s day. Better yet, have the kids draw up a big poster and serve him breakfast in bed. Presents are over-rated, though Bill Cosby said part of being a dad is pretending that soap-on-a-rope is the best present ever. 1. “Bushnell Powerview 12×25 Compact Folding Roof Prism Binocular (Black)” (Bushnell) With slightly more magnification (12X versus the usual 10X) in a compact package, these are good portable binoculars for travel and sporting events. At around $20, this is a great little binocular. 2.. Belkin conserve –...

We’ve previously reviewed the Soda Club sparkling water maker. For literally $.20 a one liter bottle, versus $1.5 for Pelligrino, you can have sparkling water at home without carting bottles back and forth to the store. If there were any complaints about the Soda Club maker, it would only be that the plastic bottles weren’t elegant enough to bring to the table. Now, Soda Club has the “Penguin,” which carbonates water in glass bottles rather than plastic. The bottles are a fairly nice design with a subtle penguin logo that could be mistaken for a European crest. No one ever has to know that you make your sparkling water at home. The Soda Club’s big promise is also...

Like most people, I have a dirty little secret: I collect tacky souvenirs from monuments and buildings when I travel. Like collections of snow globes, one monument alone is a tasteless souvenir. But put together a FULL CITY of monuments and you make a statement. My wife could never understand this mania, or “neurosis,” as she puts it, until a few years ago when the San Francisco International Airport featured a full concourse exhibit of souvenir monuments from around the world. There, in plenty of glory, were miniature reproductions of every major edifice in the world. Suddenly, my puny collection gained stature and value, rather then just being the goofy past-time of a middle-aged...

At our house, we don’t drink a lot of Coke or Sprite. The kids know that they can really only get these as an ingredient in a Shirley Temple (or Roy Rogers for my boy) when we’re out for a fancy dinner. The only carbonated drinks they get at home are Root Beer on random pizza nights and Pellegrino poured into their juice when we’re having people over for dinner. An unintentional benefit of keeping all these sugary drinks out of the house is fewer glass bottles to lug up the double staircase of our San Francisco Victorian. And, we have that many fewer bottles to toss in the trash or send to recyclying. The other night though, we saw a no-guilt and no heavy lifting solution to...