Stephanie appeared this morning on the Today Show with Natalie Morales and shared some of the year's best educational toys that help build important skills - featuring products from Lego, Blue Orange Games, Playmobil, Leapfrog, Silver Dolphin, Eeboo, I Can Do That Games, Briarpatch, Gamewright and Citiblocks. 

You can watch her here! The full article with details on all the products she demonstrated can be found at our site.

Whether you have a crawling baby or a video game addicted tween, it's important to carve out space where you get to play together!  As silly as it sounds, with everyone's busy schedules play time often gets taken off the "to do" list.   While we spend so much time making sure that everyone is doing all their "work"...the time we spend laughing with our kids  is just as important.

With the current baby boom in full swing, there seem to be an endless supply of new products vying for the attention of new parents.  The truth is that for newborns, you really don't very many toys.  So before you go shopping for a baby shower, take a look at five of our favorites that will be enjoyed.

Developmentally, babies learn from active, real-life experiences rather than being 'plugged in' to passively watching others at such an early age.

We believe a mirror would be more interactive and age-apropriate than a video screen. Reading books and talking about pictures, or interacting as you sing songs and recite rhymes, will do more to build language than plugging them into the TV to look at pretty pictures with music. For kids under two (and for all kids), less is more! We are delighted that the American Pediatric Association has agreed with our position.

Test: Reading to children is more than a great way to entertain them. Studies show that young children who are read to every day learn to read earlier and with greater ease. For infants, books are not merely for looking at. Babies tend to taste, toss, and tear their books. Even sturdy cardboard books may not survive this search-and-destroy stage. Cloth and vinyl make good chewable choices. The mechanics of turning pages, pointing to pictures, and even tasting, make books among baby's favorite playthings and a key to language development.