Daddy Dan

It's All About The Babito

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Great Toddler Christmas Gifts – 2008 Edition (Part 1)

Dec 4

Posted by Daddy Dan in Christmas, Product Reviews, Recent Posts | 5 Comments

The Fisher-Price Sing and Go Choo-Choo is a fantastic gift for kids 1-3.  It’s a three-car train that comes with a giraffe, and elephant, and monkey.  The train moves and plays songs and is very easy for a toddler to start up.  The train plays music when you put the animals in the front car.  You push the smokestack down to get the train moving.  Works on any floor, even on thick carpet.  The animals heads and legs move and make sounds too.  Babito still plays with this on a near-daily basis.

Fisher-Price Bounce & Spin Zebra – For about a year, this was The Babito’s favorite toy.  When the toddler sits on the zebra it makes a bunch of silly sounds and the child can bounce and spin the zebra around.  It cracked Babito up every time he rode it.  There are some great safety features with this toy.  The zebra will not turn unless the child’s weight is on the seat, which helps them get off and on easily.  I highly recommend this one.  It also allows you to lower the sound effect volume to a tolerable level if it starts to drive you a little nutty!


Lincoln Logs Woodland Express – 290 Pieces – The classic Lincoln Logs are always a great gift.  The Babito loves playing with this, especially since it contains a train and train track as part of the set.  I must admit that it is a little difficult for him to build things with the interlocking logs at his age (27 months) and he can get frustrated, but I think this set is a great gift for children 3 and over.  He plays with this simple train as much as he plays with his much more expensive Thomas train set.  The Lincoln Logs are also a lot of fun for the parents.  I’ve been known to get annoyed with The Babito for having fun knocking down my beautifully built log cabins.  =)

Melissa and Doug Cutting Food Box – I can’t really explain the appeal to this one.  All I can tell you is The Babito LOVES to cut up the wooden food in this high-quality set from Melissa and Doug.  The set comes with various wooden fruits, vegetable and breads that come in several pieces each, held together by velcro.  The set also comes with a cutting board and dull (obviously) wooden knife.  It’s fairly easy for toddlers to “cut” the pieces apart.  The Babito seems to get a true sense of accomplishment when he’s completed cutting all of the pieces.  It’s a truly inexpensive gift that will get a lot of use.

Melissa and Doug Band in a Box – The Melissa and Doug Band in a Box is another great gift.  The set comes with ten persussion instruments, including a tambourine, maracas, cymbals, triangle, and other noisemakers, all in a handy wooden storage box.  The Babito loves music (and noise in general – lucky Mommy and Daddy!) and love to play “Marching Band” throughout the house with these instruments (again, lucky Mommy and Daddy).

Come back later in the week where I’ll recommend some great books and DVDs for that special toddler on your Christmas list!

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Odds and Ends: Guns N’ Roses, Wii Fit, and Christmas Lights

Nov 25

Posted by Daddy Dan in Christmas, Daily Life, Music, Recent Posts, Wii | 5 Comments

  • I downloaded the new Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy, this morning and listened to it on my drive to work.  I rarely like new albums on my first listen-through, but the album is surprisingly good.  It passed my skip-over test.  I didn’t skip over any of the songs.  It’s typical rocking Guns N’ Roses.  I look forward to the next album in 2022.
  • I’ve been working out with the Wii Fit for the past few days and it’s lots of fun.  It’s well worth the $90 we paid for it.  I plan on writing a more comprehensive review after I’ve used it for a few weeks, but I thought I’d share my initial impressions here.
    • I like the fact that it has a wide variety of exercises and fun activities.  You can do various yoga, aerobic, strenth training, and balance exercises.
    • There’s a strength exercise called “The Plank” where you put your forearms on the balance board, stretch your legs back, and hold yourself up for 30 seconds (which is the beginner’s time).  That exercise is HARD!
    • The balance activities are fun.  As you continue to use the Wii Fit it unlocks more fun games and exercises, so there’s always something new to do.  My favorite balance activities so far:  Hula Hoop, Slalom Skiing, and Tightrope Walking.
    • I’m also surprisingly enjoying the Yoga exercises, which look extremely easy to do.  Trust me, they’re not.  I’m feeling the burn in my legs today.
    • I don’t like the fact that the balance board thinks it’s funny.  During my initial weigh-in it told me I was overweight, and now when I step on the balance board to do activities it sometimes says “Oooofff”.  Rude!
  • I can’t wait to decorate our house with Christmas lights and decorations.  This will be the first Christmas that The Babito truly understands that Christmas is a special holiday.  Some of our neighbors have already put up their lights and he’s amazed by them.  I told him we were going to put lights on our house this weekend and he’s excited about it.  Now I just have to resist the urge to go all Clark Griswold on our house.  We’re going old-school with the lights this year, with the big-bulbed multi-color lights.  I bought eight packs.

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Toddler Books: The Babito Reading List

Oct 14

Posted by Daddy Dan in Recent Posts, The Babito | 5 Comments

One thing we’ve tried to instill in The Babito from early babyhood is a love for books and reading.  So far I think we’ve been successful.  We read to him every night before bed, and I really think it’s helped him gain knowledge ahead of schedule.  He can recite the alphabet, count to ten, and knows his colors (at least the basics).  He can also go through pre-school flash cards and name every picture on several sets of cards now.

Ok, enough of my proud daddy boasting.  Here’s some of The Babito’s favorite books.  I’d love to hear what books your toddler loves reading.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a book that the Babito want us to read again, and again, and again.  I’m sure you’ve all seen this classic book before.  It’s a great book to teach your toddler both animals and colors.  Babito knows all the animals and their colors now, and we often hear him repeating the book’s words out loud while he lays in bed putting himself to sleep.

Elmo & Friends (Look and Find) is Babito’s favorite book.  I know we’ve read through it at least 100 times.  Each page features a different color and a sub-box with many items of that color that Babito must find on the pages.  He loves going through this book and it’s also helped him learn the names of various items and colors.  Personally, I’m sick of this book, but the Babito never tires of it.

Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed is another book that’s a regular feature of Babito’s bedtime.  It’s a fun book that toddlers love to repeat, and it also gives you a chance to explain that it’s not ok to jump on the bed.  (It does make you question the Momma Monkey’s parenting skills though.)

Guess How Much I Love You is another classic that gives you a wonderful opportunity to explain to your toddler just how much you love him or her.  Babito is turning out to be a very affectionate and sensitive little boy, and I know this book reinforces his personality.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George is a fun book filled with many fun adventures.  The wide variety of topics and stories keeps things interesting for your toddler.  Babito, like most kids, love monkeys, and he loves this book too.

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Short Book Review: Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman

Oct 9

Posted by Daddy Dan in Book Reviews, Going Green, Recent Posts | 1 Comment

I’m one of ‘those people’ that have never been totally convinced about global warming.  It seems to me that the scientific community is somewhat mixed in their opinions on the topic, but who knows what scientists and experts are in the pocket of the oil industry, the auto industry, or for that matter the environmental-related businesses.  Lately I’ve been leaning more and more toward the global warming side, but I’m still not totally convinced.

I read Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded to educate myself more on this issue, and I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t really MATTER whether or not it’s true – we still need to do something about our addiction to oil, coal, and natural gas.

With the world’s rapidly expanding middle class, and exceptional growth in China, India, and other developing nations we’re using more natural resources than ever before, and there’s no infinite quantity.  Some day we’re going to run out of these resources and we need to start working on clean alternative energy to take its place.

Friedman’s book discusses the various problems with our dependence on ‘dirty’ energy, and it’s not just climate change.  The West buys our fuels from dictatorships in the Middle East and other areas that are hostile to us (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) and we’re passing along enormous wealth to these countries.  The development of these fuels are destroying tropical forests and other ecosystems, despoiling rivers, and leading to an incredible amount of species extinction.

If we want our kids to grow up in a better world than we did, we must move forward with discovering and developing clean energy solutions that will improve our environment and our societies and help the developing world continue to flourish.  The book outlines steps that our world needs to take to make this goal a reality.

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