ReubenMiller

Straws for Your Budding Plumbing Engineer

Kids love drinking through twisty straws. Well, what if you could configure them like a senior plumbing engineer? With Strawz, your kid (or the kid in you) can have endless fun drinking through pipelines of straw plumbing. Who knows? You might inspire your kid to aim for a nice six-figure profession in plumbing engineering.

(thanks, Tina)

ARCHE TOY by Floris Hovers

Check out more at ARCHE TOY

Plush Organs

Cuddle up with your favorite organ! Gory just became cute.

More pics at the jump.

Buy them here.

Cardboard Play Kitchen

I'm alway on the lookout for cool repurposing projects. Especially when it comes to kids toys. Why bother running to big box department stores and doling out loads of cash for made-in-china toys?

I think Anna's little kitchen unit built entirely from recycled (as in, salvaged from the dumpster) corrugated cardboard is brilliant. Now I'm wishing her plans might become 'shareware'.

Read more here.

[Thanks GoodyBlog]

Now Veggies are as Cool as Cheetos

A Stanford University study had kids taste food in McDonald packaging and unmarked packaging and asked which they preferred. The kids preferred the McDonald packaged food not realizing that they went for it because they were conditioned to believe "it must taste good."

You can be negative about the effects of advertising and packaging, but I think if you apply the lesson learned from the study noted above, you'll find that you can use this information positively.

After being inspired by the Stanford University study on McDonald's packaging effect on kids, I came up with an idea to get kids to eat their veggies as enthusiastically as 'snack'. If zip-seal bags would be pre-printed with cool graphics like those on national brand snack packaging (which kids love), then they might be more inclined to take, display and eat their healthy snacks in school with zest.

Well, Mobi has already created this product! They make a great array of appealing sandwich bags, pre-printed with various designs that can even give cut-up celery sticks a zap of show-off cool factor.

Mobi's bags would be perfect for influencing kids to see healthy snacks as the 'cool thing'.

As an added bonus, these bags are environmentally friendly. The materials used to make them are recycled and recyclable. Furthermore in 2008 the company plans to use strictly biodegradable films in their products.

In addition to the environment, they are also passionate about helping endangered species and global aid.

(sources: Mobi, Fancy Food & CNN)

Drink Your Bot

bot is a healthy, low sugar alternative to the regular juice box drink. And besides for what's in it, bot's branding is probably a hit with kids and adults alike. I'm noticing more and more Japanese style characters/mascots on US products - which is a good thing! Also check out their website.

Atomic Vintage

Why not buy one of these for little Tommy?

Via LiveLeak

How to make you very own Pop-Up Pics

"As a young girl, I had a slight obsession with pop-up books. I would collect them, display them open on our family coffee table and pretend they were a little community of people in The World of Erin.

And NOW? Now I want to make a community of actual people in The World of Erin. People I really know, from photographs I really have. Because, hey, I'm weird." - Erin Loechner

See instructions at Curbly

Titou Le Lapinou

Titou Le Lapinou  is a French animated music video that I discovered recently. Besides my kids loving this, I thought they were beautifully animated. This kind of animation really does true justice to the art of 3-D animation.

MONKEYS

Spotted this on swissmiss.