Family Fun on Neighborhood Toy Store Day!

Yesterday was the third annual Neighborhood Toy Store Day.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, it’s a special day that was created by The American Specialty Toy and Retailing Association to encourage families to get better acquainted with their local toy stores.  I’m all for supporting local businesses (especially when their business is toys–woohoo!), so as soon as I heard about this event, I knew I had to participate.

I’m almost ashamed to admit that we hadn’t shopped any local toy stores since we had our precious little monsters, and I didn’t even know where to go.  Luckily, there’s a web site for that!  So, I headed over to Your Neighborhood Toy Store and did a quick search.  It turns out there are 7 such toy stores within ten miles of my house.  This was news to me–good news!

We chose one of the closest stores to us, The Hobby Shop in Aberdeen, NJ.  This store is huge and has every kind of toy imaginable.  Trains, dolls, magic tricks, crafts…there was so much to see, we could have spent all day wandering around the store.  My son, however, didn’t waste any time finding his favorite spot and planting himself there.

While he was busy monopolizing the train table, my daughter was taking advantage of the fun activities the store was offering.  The dude on the left is Seymour Hobby, not my daughter 🙂

Since the kids were with us, we weren’t prepared to get any real Christmas shopping done.  That didn’t stop us from picking up a few goodies that we could play with right away.

They had Colorforms AND Shrinky Dinks!  They’re classics; how could I not get them?  We also grabbed two slide whistles, because apparently, there just isn’t enough noise in our house.

For our family, Neighborhood Toy Store Day was a hit.  We all got to play and we were able to support a local business.  There is so much awesomeness in both those things that I can hardly contain myself.  Seriously!

No need to worry if you missed out on the fun of Neighborhood Toy Store Day–there’s still plenty of time to visit a local toy store and get some holiday shopping done.  Just don’t forget to celebrate the next one!  This fun “holiday” will take place every year on the second Saturday in November.  Now you know.  Go write it down or something  🙂