Stella McCartney's new GapKids and BabyGap collection debuted earlier this week. A Stella McCartney for GapKids Pop-Up Store opened on Robertson Boulevard today. It will remain open through Saturday, Nov. 28. All the Rage says the space was previously a Gap 1969 denim boutique. Actress Liv Tyler hosted the opening of the Pop-up store at kid-friendly event which included face painting and balloon animals.
Stella McCartney created a clothing collection for GapKids and BabyGap for fall 2009. Some of the items include leopard sweater tunics, sweater hoodies, band jackets, duck boots, tulle skirts, five pocket jeans, ribbed tights and duck boots. The collection arrived in stores this week. You can browse the collection here on Gap.com.
Stella McCartney said, "For years now I've wanted to create a collection for kids. It’s really exciting for us to do a boys and girls collection with Gap for the first time. I think it has a mix of the playful and practical. I tried to create a whole kids wardrobe. There are pieces that are classic and sort of timeless and hopefully very chic, mixed with more playful and a little bit cooler pieces. It’s a reflection of our brand and a great way to experience it."
Yesterday, the Sesame Street store was offering a free Big Bird Google Doodle t-shirt with the purchase of a Sesame Street 40th anniversary item. Now the Sesame Street store is offering a free Cookie Monster Google Doodle T-Shirt with every 40th Anniversary item purchased. Looking at the list of clothing available they do not appear to be selling either shirt individually. However, they do have lots of cool shirts, such as the Bert Face shirt.
Google has a new doodle today to celebrate Sesame Street's 40th anniversary. Google's Sesame Street doodle does not look the same in every country. Big Bird legs help make the "l" in Google in the U.S. version. The Next Web posted some Google Doodles from other countries.
The Sesame Street store has a 40th anniversary section. You can find 40th anniversary books and DVDs. There's also a 40th Anniversary Corduroy Elmo. The store even carries a shirt with the Big Bird Google doodle. The shirt comes free with every 40th Anniversary item purchased.
There was a preview of the Barbie Doll'd Up Nails Digital Nail Printer technology earlier this year at CES. Now the nail printer is available and the first commerical has arrived. It's likely to be one of the hot toys for girls this year.
The digital nail printer lets girls create, customize and print designs for nails at home. Barbie Doll'd Up Nails connects to a PC via USB. Girls apply a pre-coat and then insert their fingers into the device. Printing takes just a few seconds. Then a top coat is applied. Girls can choose from 1000s of nail designs or upload their own graphics and photos.
The nail printer is sold exclusively at Toys R Us. You can buy it here. The price listed as of this writing is $149.99.
The Disney Cruise Line has released details of its cruise ship named Disney Dream that will set sail in 2011. The ship's design offers a blend of Art Deco style and Disney whimsy. Some of the unique features on the ship include;
The AquaDuck, a water coaster that sends guests racing above the upper decks of the ship.
A sophisticated lounge where the sun sets over the skyline of a different world-famous city each night.
Rooms contain a Virtual Porthole that provides guests with a real-time view outside the ship. High-definition cameras placed on the exterior of the ship feed live video to each Virtual Porthole.
Disney's Oceaneer Lab lets children feel as though they are embarking on a great seafaring adventure in a room filled with maps, maritime instruments and swashbuckling artifacts
The Edge Edge is a lounge for tweens (ages 11 to 13). The tween pad is filled with hi-tech entertainment including the ability to create and star in photo postcards and video karaoke using green-screen technology.
Animator's Palate is a signature Disney Cruise Line restaurant that brings Disney animation into the dining room.
Royal Palace is a restaurant inspired by the classic Disney films Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty.
Enchanted Garden is a whimsical, casual restaurant inspired by the gardens of Versailles and featuring a dining environment that magically transforms from day to night.
The ship will also have attractions just for adults including The District, a nighttime entertainment area, and the Senses Spa & Salon
The Disney Dream is scheduled to depart on its maiden voyage Jan. 26, 2011, and will sail alternating three and four night cruises to the Bahamas and Disney's private island, Castaway Cay.
A Michigan dentist's office is offering to buy candy back from kids on Monday. Kids can trade in some of the candy they collected while trick-or-treating for cash at a rate of $1 per pound. A local store here on WNDU says the collected candy will be sent overseas to the troops. The dentist says he is not out to ruin Halloween and says he hands out candy himself. Take a look:
Everything is made with kids in mind these days, even pasta servers. The latest fun trend is to turn everything prehistoric. This 13 inches long pasta server called Pastasaurus is shaped like a dinosaur and contains "pasta-snaring teeth."
Since the dawn of time, mankind has labored over the challenge of slippery spaghetti. Then the mighty Pastasaurus appeared on earth, uniquely adapted to this very task.
It's ergonomically designed handle and pasta-snaring teeth work together to make it a lean, mean, spaghetti-serving machine. It's total prehistoric perfection!
Pastasaurus retails for $7.99 and can be purchased here from Perpetual Kid.
Here is a quick way to go sledding. Just put on a pair of these SnowShorts and you are ready the zoom down the hill. The shorts fit over a snowsuit or snowpants and contain a sled on the bottom. The foam-padded PVC seat is fused to the pull-on shorts. These may difficult to wash. The Pull-on SnowShorts cost $35 and can be purchased here from Orvis.
Do you want ice cubes shaped like Legos? There's a tray for that at the Lego store. The rubber tray will make ten frozen Lego shaped cubes at a time. The Ice Brick Tray costs $7.99. The product page can be found here.
The New York Timestakes a look at the latest parenting trend: yelling instead of spanking children. It's not that most parents want to yell at their children, it turns out. But they have accepted that spanking children could lead to developmental problems and aggression later in life. So they've tried time outs, counting and other strategies that have absolutely no effect on a misbehaving small child. Tempers fray, they snap and they yell. But then they feel bad about it later.
"I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking," said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. "This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don't work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again."
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One study that did take a look at the topic — a paper on the "psychological aggression by American parents" published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2003 — found that parental yelling was a near-universal occurrence. Of 991 families interviewed, in 88 percent of them a parent acknowledged shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn't specify how many did it more often) in the previous year.
"We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it's not harmful," said one of the study's lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. "But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you'd find that pretty jarring. We don't apply that standard to children."
Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It's at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child's sense of well-being and self-esteem.
"It isn't the yelling per se that's going to make a difference, it's how the yelling is interpreted," said Ronald P. Rohner, director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut. If a parent is simply loud, he says, the effect is minimal. But if the tone connotes anger, insult or sarcasm, it can be perceived as a sign of rejection.
So, it's not the volume that's the problem, it's what the parent is saying? We suppose that makes some sense. If a parent screams personal insults at a child, of course that will be damaging to the child. But if the parent merely expresses frustration by saying loudly "I'm so tired of looking for that stuffed bunny!" that's not a personal insult. Generally speaking, we don't think screaming is an effective way to communicate with anyone -- children or adults.
American Eagle's kids brand 77kids is opening a special pop-up store at The Mall at Robinson in Pittsburgh. The store opened to customers Wednesday, October 21, and will remain open for 77 days. This is the first pop-up stoer for the online brand, which launched in October, 2008. Permanent 77kids stores are planned for 2010.
"We are excited to offer our friends in the Pittsburgh-area the opportunity to
shop 77kids in a store environment for the very first time," said Betsy
Schumacher, chief merchandising officer, 77kids by american eagle. "The
experience offers something fun and unexpected, both in terms of product
assortment, as well as the surprises and activities for kids."
The pop-up store will feature top selections from the holiday assortment,
including denim, graphic tees, hoodies, cold weather accessories, dress-up items
and sleepwear. Customers can shop the full 77kids holiday assortment at a touch
screen kiosk in the store. 77kids gift cards are also available. A 77-day pop-up
countdown will be prominently displayed at the entrance of the store.
Researchers discovered that when children watch scary movies with their parents it actually makes the movie more scary. In fact, the group of children who watched scary movies with their parents were actually four times as frightened as the group that watched without parents.
The researchers were surprised by their findings at first, but later understood what was happening. If you flinch when something scary happens, the kid picks up on that and is even more scared. In other words kids miss a lot in movies and tv that adults pick up on. The study showed that many children have nightmares about scary things they've seen on tv.
Parents have been told over and over not to let kids watch TV alone. But now a new study shows that advice can backfire: Researchers found that children who watched television with their folks were almost four times as likely to be frightened by scary programs as those who viewed alone.
As the season of ghouls and gore (and horror flicks on cable) begins — and as some parents worry the new film Where the Wild Things Are may be too intense for their youngsters -- this new study highlights the confusion many parents experience as they try to ease kids' fears.
The findings were perplexing even to the authors of the study. They had expected to prove that parents had a comforting effect on their kids, according to the report in the upcoming issue of the journal Child: Care, Health and Development. Instead they found that parents' attempts to offer solace to scared kids may just make matters worse.
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Kids might have missed certain things in a TV program if the parents weren't there to point them out, Tolan explains, adding that kids sometimes do better if you simply distract them from what scares them.
And it isn't just limited to what you do or say, says Alan E. Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University. Kids easily pick up on mom's and dad's emotions. The human brain is wired up with "mirror neurons," Kazdin explains. These nerve cells allow you to feel what someone else is feeling without a word being uttered. "So when the parent is watching something scary on TV and is frightened by it, the child models that," Kazdin says.
As for easing a child's fears over monsters or the like, the experts found that a straight forward, calm approach that rewards bravery worked best. Over coddling creates more fear and joking about fear just makes it worse for children.
The Upper Deck Company has entered into a new licensing agreement with Sanrio. The trading card company will be producing a line of Hello Kitty collectible miniatures and a stickers trading card game (TCG) starting next spring. The first release is scheduled to hit the market in March 2010.
"We are so excited to be adding such a global icon to our product portfolio," said Margeaux Sullivan, Upper Deck's Hello Kitty brand manager. "Hello Kitty has been charming girls of all ages around the world for more than three decades and we look forward to helping her celebrate her 35th anniversary."
Targeted to young girls and tweens, the TCG will include collectible figures, stickers and trading cards that will appeal to Hello Kitty fans. Upper Deck is planning to issue three concurrent releases next year.
This children's flatware set contains a construction-vehicle shaped fork, spoon, and pusher. Kids will not be able to resist literally shoveling in mouthfulls of peas and carrots with these utensils. It's available here on the Child Health Site for $19.95.
American Eagle's kids brand 
The Upper Deck Company has entered into a new licensing agreement with Sanrio. The trading card company will be producing a line of Hello Kitty collectible miniatures and a stickers trading card game (TCG) starting next spring. The first release is scheduled to hit the market in March 2010.
