Palo Alto / Menlo Park Forums

Klutz Has a Toy Store in College Terrace!

2008-05-02T10:51:00-08:00

Let’s face it, with all the organized sports activities we have now, kids are not likely to be very creative with soccer balls or hockey sticks or baseball gloves. My 3-1/2 year-old son Marco was just kept out of a toddler soccer class by his “coach” because he didn’t have proper shin guards on. Whatever happened to just letting them play?

Klutz sells inventive toys that have nothing to do with organized sports, and they often sell books with them to get kids and parents started thinking about the possibilities with these toys.

The photos above and to the right show the toys I bought when I visited the Klutz Store for the first time last week. We’re having lots of fun with them!

Do you like Klutz toys? I love them! I admit that my infatuation started with the self-deprecating Yiddish name and their adult-oriented toys, but since I’ve become a parent, I’ve come to appreciate them even more.

Well, I’ve recently discovered that Klutz is based in Palo Alto and has a retail store in College Terrace, Palo Alto! It’s on College Avenue, a few storefronts up from JJ&F;Market.

Certainly, I also really like other local toy stores like the Palo Alto Sport & Toy World on Waverley in PA, Diddams on Hamilton in PA, and Cheeky Monkey Toys on Santa Cruz Ave. in MP. However, I was thrilled to find the Klutz Store because of its unique focus on Klutz toys.

Klutz toys are distinctive because, like sporting goods, they are low-tech and often encourage physical activity, but unlike sporting goods, they are explicitly designed to spur creative invention.

College Terrace – what does it take to make a neighborhood family-friendly?

2007-12-12T07:23:00-08:00

Plenty of other parents in the area had their own parties, though, and once it was dark, College Avenue, the boulevard that gives our neighborhood its name, was thronged with little ghouls, princesses and superheroes in a fair approximation of what a perfect Halloween night is supposed to be.

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College Terrace in Palo Alto is often sold as a great neighborhood for families and, for the most part, that’s been our experience. But just as it takes a bit of effort to throw a decent Halloween party each year, making a neighborhood conducive to family life also doesn’t happen automatically. It takes both luck and some active effort on the part of parents to pull it off.

Here’s the luck part. We’re fortunate in that our neighborhood has good bones. It’s easily demarcated, for example, because ours is a two by twelve block finger of Palo Alto that juts into Stanford University’s land. That makes its identity clear, which in turn encourages the sense of belonging that’s a prerequisite of neighborhood pride. Each of our cross streets are also blocked at one end, making for less cut-though traffic than we’d otherwise see. Then we have a high performing elementary school right next door, and four small ‘pocket’ parks (two with play structures, one with a pair of tennis courts, and another housing a small library and child care center) to play in. At one end of the terrace we have a retail area with stores, banks and a weekly farmers market. At the other we can easily walk to open space.

All of those family-friendly features make it highly sought after, which unfortunately puts serious upward pressure on the price it takes to call the area home. But here luck saves us again. Dotted between many of our single family homes are clusters of small rental units, built to attract Stanford graduate students, which keep us from being socio-economically monolithic.

Thanks to the avarice (or could it be the pro-neighborhood leanings?) of our subdivision’s late nineteenth century developers, our lots are small, which means our houses are fairly close together. And that means we all see each other often. It’s how, soon after moving into our new home, my wife and I found five families living just a few blocks of us with children the same age as ours. We’ve been getting together, in what we simply call ‘the Playgroup,’ roughly once a week ever since.

If we’ve started out with such good fortune, what work does it take on our parts to make our neighborhood family friendly? Well, it takes honoring the basic commitments we make to each other, like turning up regularly at the weekly playdate in the face of social and economic pressures that give us plenty of reasons to be elsewhere. And it’s in the many small things we do to act upon our pro-family intentions and values. It’s the time we give to watch each other’s children when we can. It’s in the way we share with each other our frustrations and triumphs as parents. It’s in how we help each other – to make meals for a family facing an emergency, perhaps – through hard times.

There’s nothing hugely heroic about any of that. But over time these many small actions build relationships of enormous resilience and power. Networks of old but far-flung friends are hugely life sustaining. Neighbors without children are great to have around. But people who see you and your children every day, and whose children you see, who are literally there when you need something as simple as a child watched for an hour by someone you trust, a loan of a car seat for a day, or just a smile of ‘I-was-doing-that-yesterday’ understanding as you grumpily push a wailing toddler around the block, are worth their equal weight in gold.

Much of what sustains us as Playgroup neighbors comes from the work we do in our own families to figure out what is manageable in our lives. We all have at least one spouse, and sometimes two, in a high-pressure professional job. We’re all pushed just to get our children to eat well, spend the time with them we want to as a family, get some exercise, maybe the odd date night with our husbands or wives – the whole juggling act that is modern parenting.

To figure out how neighborliness fits on top of everything else takes measuring our expectations of each other against how busy we know we all are. It takes recognizing the limits to the commitments we ourselves are able to make—as well as a faith that such commitments will add to our family lives. And all of those calculations require regular recalibration as our children, and our circumstances, change.

So here’s where all that calibration has taken us: to one afternoon a week when we know where to find children roughly the same age as ours to play with. We meet at a park close by. The kids run their own games – although sometimes we’ll bring bats, balls, stomp rockets or sidewalk chalks to get things going.

On top of that we automatically invite all the Playgroup kids to each other’s birthday parties. We work to avoid party inflation – where each family tries to outdo the last. And we have a few other parties through the year. There’s the Halloween party my family tends to run, and a couple of pot lucks we have in the spring and fall that include the wider neighborhood.

It’s not neighborhood nirvana. It’s not how things used to be in communities where one parent was always guaranteed to be at home all day. But it is sustainable. A…

Should Play End With Preschool?

2007-10-19T10:00:00-08:00

The irony is that Bing is far from the Stanford of preschools. There’s hardly a book in sight there. Instead, it’s entirely play-based, so Bing is more like the Chico State of preschools. Party school, baby!

I’m very skeptical of Palo Alto (CA) area parents’ interest in play. It reminds me of my single days when my male friends and I took up salsa dancing. Did we love dancing, or did we just consider it a means to another much more important end?

While parents here might be extremely driven to get their kids into a play-based preschool, they certainly don’t want them to play after preschool. Have you really looked at the neighborhoods around here recently? Where the heck are the kids? Where are the games of tag, pickup basketball games, etc.? OK, many are at organized sports practices and games, but those are adult-controlled, so kids aren’t engaging in “free play,” where they decide what to do and how.

From the point of view of an old kid like me who played outside every day thirty-something years ago, Palo Alto and surrounding communities are utterly B-O-R-I-N-G.

By and large, Palo Alto area parents see play for toddlers as a means to another end - intellectual and social development in the school years. A number of developmental psychology studies, most done at lab schools like Bing over the years, do indicate that play in the preschool years gives children an advantage in academic achievement in school in later years.

Parents around here just assume then, I guess, that the benefits of play abruptly end at the age of five, when children enter kindergarten. Thus, they can just drop their kids in Bing or a Bing wannabe (there are many in the area) for two years and feel like they have filled their kids’ quota for play.

Likewise, I quit salsa dance lessons six years ago in the very month I met the woman who would become my wife. Unfortunately, just as the benefits of salsa dancing go well beyond picking up babes (e.g. I’d be in better shape if I were salsa dancing now), the benefits of play go well beyond preparing kids for academic achievement in elementary school.

Many psychologists and medical researchers have written about how play continues to yield important benefits to children well beyond the preschool years. For example, see the recent American Academy of Pediatrics’ report entitled, ”The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds,” David Elkind’s “Power of Play,” or Paul Donahue’s “Parenting Without Fear: Letting Go of Worry and Focusing on What Really Matters.”

These writers point out how free play beyond the preschool years yields benefits in creativity, social skills, leadership skills, problem solving, happiness, and physical fitness.

I don’t think we need Bing-like play-based lab elementary schools. However, I do hope that parents realize that, when their kids move on from play-based preschools like Bing to academic elementary schools, they have a responsibility to keep play as an important part of their children’s lives. That means letting them play in their neighborhoods around their homes much like they were able to play in preschool.

Certainly, over time, they should spend more time on academics and less on play, but play, and I mean *free* play, should always remain a prominent aspect of kids’ lives. An 10-year-old who can’t go outside on his own and help organize a game of tag or pickup basketball is as deficient as a 4-year-old who can’t recite his ABCs or count to ten.

“Bing! Your son goes to Bing? How’d he get in?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that in the last few weeks. My 3-year-old son Marco just started at Bing Nursery School a couple of weeks ago.

A lot of Palo Alto area parents would kill, or so it seems, to get their kids into Bing. “About once a week, a parent loses his or her cool and is rude on the phone to Svetlana Stanislavskaya, Bing’s enrollment director.” (See this article.)

Bing is the Stanford University “Lab School,” and like Stanford, far more kids apply than can possibly go there. I’ve heard from someone (is it true???) that its waiting list is 4,000, and the school enrolls only 400 students!!! How can a nursery school be in such high demand?