Christmas Time Is Here! Gather All That Cheer! This year we are bringing you the best of the best toys we have out there. It was hard this year to find items that were actually worth the money you can spend on them. Is it just me? Or have toys just gotten kinda repetitive and sad?
   Everything is tiny, blind, or does little to nothing- literally.  I see the kids rip open the package in a fury then place the unicorn poop hybrid figure on their shelf never to be touched again,.  Nothing promotes imaginative play, or stimulates education like they use too.
      Oh my goodness I am sounding old aren't I? Well If I am I am sorry, but I am feeling  the loss of Toys R Us.I use to walk up and down the aisles to pick and choose what I wanted to buy the kids. I use to reminiscence about my father telling me "go for it" when I finally found something worth asking for. I am missing the toys on those shelves. The hidden gems you found that weren't screaming at you during our kids shows commercial breaks. that "ahhh" moment when you knew you found that perfect gift for that kid in your life. I MISS it dammit.
      I am feeling the loss of innocence during the holidays, and as someone who works directly with the toy companies I feel like they are at a loss too. They are pushing products but without the same enthusiasm they once held. 90 percent of what I say this year was not even worth mentioning.
 We need toys to promote imagination, we need to promote fun and yes we even need toys that promote education (bleh). Right now these companies are just repeating the same things they have come up with for the last four years and re- making it into something slightly different from the original. Where are the new ideas!  Four years ago was the last time I was truly excited about what was coming for the holidays. After that I feel like the world has went stagnant.  You will read studies and they will all say that it is because we live in the time of the screens. Which is partly true. As an eighties baby myself, we may not have had mobile phones and tablets and alike, but we had TV, VHS, game boys and gaming systems. We had portable "laptops" that had games on them that made the beep beep beep that drove all our parents nuts. Yes things have gotten wayyy cooler but honestly I don't think that technology is not the only problem here. It is the way we parent. Instead of giving the kids toys that promote imaginative play, we give them the game controller. Instead of sitting and reading with them we give them a tablet. We say sure when they want to download an app then delete it five minutes later. For crying out loud most kids would rather watch other kids play with toys on Youtube than play with them themselves.
    I think this year we all need to make a resolution to cut it out (as Dave Coulie would say) and make our kids imagine, stop doing things because its easy, and maybe this will give the toy companies the drive to produce some truly spectacular things next year! Lets bring the fun back to toys as a community! I think we can do it.

    Now that, that rant is over I can tell you that all the toys that I am reviewing, I love. We are sent a lot of toys every year, and to the marketers dismay there is no guarantee that they will make it on my site. (Sorry guys it is true.) I don't get paid for my reviews, which means basically that it is up to me whether or not I write about something. So if you see an item up here- unless it says "AD" then I am not getting any money for the review. What I am writing I believe, because otherwise you wouldn't see it on my site. Period. My point being that I think that despite my kinda melancholy monologue up there I think we do have some cool things for the kiddos this year, and we hope you like them as well! Let us know what you think- let us know what you think we should add- and finally- Let The Mommy's Guide To Toys, finally begin!

-MJ Aucone