Now nearly seven, we've been allowing Z to stay up and play quietly in her room after her bedtime routine. To our surprise, after some typical toy play sessions she has turned this evening hour or so (she typically declares herself tired enough to go to sleep by around 9:30) into one of the most productive periods of her day. Some evenings she rounds up scissors and tape, paper and string, raids our recycling bins, and emerges with an invention or doll outfit. Other nights she develops songs to sing to us or dance routines.

"Superbaby" (our name, not hers) is what she made a few nights ago, out of some deflated balloons.











We'll write something up about Z's "free-range" bedtime for anyone who's interested!

The Doodle Roll is a simple concept: A "self-serve" roll of paper in a case, with a place to store crayons, for drawing on the go. It's a significant improvement on a core idea we've seen before -- Klutz's Doodle Dogs/Cats/etc. from several years ago, still on the market -- because it takes advantage of the two big benefits of roll paper drawing: long-form drawing (murals or narratives) and collaboration (providing a strip long enough for multiple artists to draw together). Z has enjoyed drawing tiny murals on adding machine paper before, so this sounded like a good idea to us. As it turns out, Doodle Roll offers a welcome twist on the hurry-up-and-wait activity in any setting where parents (a) pull out scraps of paper and a crayon or pen, (b) carry around a full drawing kit with paper and a pencil pouch, or (c) curse themselves for forgetting the drawing stuff again.

Our six-year-old had no trouble unrolling more paper from the roll, which is pretty much the most important criteria this device needs to meet. She couldn't get the crayon compartment open, but if you're carrying a Doodle Roll around in your purse or car, you'll be glad for the tight fit.



There are no snaps or clasps to impede even younger users from similar success -- it's a simple molded plastic inset lip made of forgiving PET plastic. But even if you're the official assistant to the artist, it's easy to unspool enough paper to keep them going for a while.

The plastic used sort of screams "disposable," but we're glad they chose it. PET is as pervasive and as easily recyclable as a soft drink bottle, whereas a firmer plastic like polypropylene, although it might get a bit more use, would use up significantly more resources to manufacture and recycle.

Z's one note of dissatisfaction was with crayon quality. She is a connoisseur of crayons and found the set provided by Doodle Roll to be too soft and easily broken. Personally, I was pleased that they weren't waxy, poor colorers like the kind you get at restaurants. They actually color well. That said, it's four crayons. They're easy to replace with your own if and when they get broken.

The cheapskates in us saw this product and said, "Hey, maybe I should bring a roll of adding machine tape to our next meal out instead of pieces of paper." That plus Z's ever-ready pouch full of crayons would do the trick. But there are two advantages -- okay, three if you count the sheer convenience -- to the Doodle Roll. One is that the plastic case grips the roll end of the paper and holds it flat, so the paper doesn't further unspool while your child is drawing. (I know, cheapskates -- a pencil pouch on one side of the roll and a set of keys on the other would do the same.) The other is that this paper is wider than adding machine tape, and gives kids a lot more room to work with vertically. The Doodle Roll comes in 4" and 6" wide strips, which, incidentally, we cannot find anywhere on the Internet for purchase on their own. (It figures: Doodle Roll maker Imagination Brands' founder, Marc Cooper, works in the paper industry.) If you could track these things down, and stashed a rubber-banded one in a drawing kit with a set of four or more crayons, and planned to improvise a method for holding the roll in place everywhere you went, you would essentially be duplicating the features of the Doodle Roll. But you would be doing so in order to save $4 minus whatever the paper cost you. Even cheapskates have a breaking point, right?

The Doodle Roll is sold in 4" and 6" widths (with 15' and 30' lengths of paper, respectively) for $3.99 and $4.99 at children's stores nationwide, thanks to a distribution deal with Schylling. The 4"x15' roll is suitable for a large purse, if you don't mind the weight, but either size travels well as standalone items or in your child's own bag, as everything is self-contained in the plastic carrier.

Side note: Z's drawing, shown above, is a scene from Jasper Tompkins' exceptional, out-of-print children's book The Catalog.

This item, received from the company for review, is a consumable and is not affected by our Keep No Stuff policy.

Preschool- and early-elementary age children do not need to be taught how to be creative. They are a fountain of surprising perspectives, unassimilated flights of fancy, and wild ideas filtered through a kaleidescopic and rapidly shifting internal logic. Watching a child who has pushed him- or herself to the point of mastering the crayon, the marker, and the pen to the point where they can make their hand approximate what they see in their mind is a magical process. It is a special process. And it has no need for "lessons about the creative use of color and patterns" that open with color-by-number coloring pages and then "progress" to freedom through mastery of a particular artist's highly personal and signature style. Period.

P'kolino disagrees with this philosophy, and apparently pop artist Romero Britto does as well, because they've just come out with a "Color Like An Artist" coloring book that will teach your child, in paint-by-number fashion, to "use patterns and colors" like he does. You too can have a little Romero Britto Jr. churning out masterpieces for your refrigerator door!

I have two arguments to offer in my attempt to protect your child from this book.

First: To say that art is supposed to be a fun, freeing activity for young children, rather than providing an adult expectation to "measure up to," might seem like a prescription for some children but not others. If a coloring page is telling them what form the objects in their mind should take on paper, telling them what colors to use, and where, might genuinely excite a child who enjoys learning other subjects through worksheets. But art, for the preschool and early primary-grade child, is different from reading, writing, telling time, and anything else you could teach through a fill-in-the-blank model. Art is about exploring and expressing a child's own thoughts and ideas about the world at a time when words inevitably fail them. A young child who would prefer to be told how to draw something is one step away from asking you to just draw it for them. There is a fine line between pulling an assist and helping your child work out a technical matter they are dealing with, and dominating their imagination.

Second: Your child is more creative than you. Not only that, but your child -- not some fictional, idealized, or gifted child, your child -- is more creative than Romero Britto, Pablo Picasso, or anyone else who might deign to "teach" your young child about art. What those artists had, or have, that your child doesn't, are technical skills, an interest and/or insight into themes beyond the range of childhood, and an educational and creative background that puts more tools at their disposal in expressing themselves. The age range of this product -- 2-6 -- is not the right time for these topics. And as far as creativity is concerned, the best a professional artist can do is preserve or recapture for themselves some part of what your child naturally possesses.

Adult fans of Romero Britto's "optimistic" pop style have plenty of ways to surround themselves with it -- jewelry or salt and pepper shakers from the Franklin Mint, Britto luggage sets, as well as trinket boxes, travel mugs, wine bottle stoppers, wind chimes. As for your commendable impulse to train up your two- to six-year-old child for adulthood, teach them to ride a bike, play Angry Birds, or make salt dough ornaments, but don't try to help them learn to be creative. It's one of the rare and precious cases where you can sit back and let them teach you what you used to know.

Celebrity bear Corduroy had chins wagging at a recent red carpet appearance, in which she wore a provocative toilet-paper-and-rubber-band gown by couture designer Zella McNichols.

Pundits agreed that the selection of colors coordinated well with Corduroy's trademark pink armband, a stubborn reminder of a 2008 injury that had tabloids prematurely announcing the star's death at the jaws of rapscallion daschund Harley Earl, who is still at large. "The somewhat bedraggled appearance of the gown is a testament to all Corduroy has been through since the pre-K heartthrob declared himself a woman after that injury," Page Six's Jarrett Brockington opined. "Between her frequent joyrides in the clothes dryer and the prominent eye scratches from her only haircut, Corduroy is a classic post-Brittany diva. She's managed to keep herself in the public eye with hard living and a decadent lifestyle despite not having worked in years."

We loved this idea from the start: A website where you can design your own stuffed creature, select from hundreds of visual elements to mix and match however you like, and have the resulting 9" softie shipped to your door. I'm pretty sure this would have been impossible to get off the ground five years ago, and although recent technological advances make customized toys feel like an idea whose time has come, we wondered if the folks at Xoddo had pulled it off or had a disaster on their hands. We asked them to let us design and order a softie through their site to test their software, ordering, and physical product, and they agreed. What we discovered was a pleasant surprise.

Designing your Xoddo softie

When you hit Xoddo.com, you're immediately invited to start designing a softie, and you won't be able to resist browsing the menu of visual elements you can add to and position on the vaguely teddyish design template. There are more items than you'd think, and the menus are obviously built to allow easy expansion; building these out is probably the cheapest part of Xoddo's operation.


One critical area of risk for a site like this is the functionality and friendliness of the design tool. If you don't have fun making your softie, you're very unlikely to be in the mood to order one (we'll get to the price in a minute) once you've battled your way through it, and far more likely to give up on the way. The company clearly understood this, and did a good job of making the tool very easy to use and reasonably intuitive. We worked with our five-year-old on the design, and although she made all the design choices (don't blame me for those freaky alien eyes or the necktie-and-bunny-slippers outfit), as her supplicant navigators of the web Jenni and I both had a little trouble with a couple of the functions, and had to figure them out. Deleting a layer or item you've added, for example, requires you to drag the layer, and sometimes you can't put your cursor on just the layer you want, and have to sort of shift them around to get to the item you'd like to remove. Clearing the entire design is a single button click away, though, and the button is located right next to the figure, which means it isn't hard to accidentally clear a bunch of work and creating some ill will among possible softie shoppers.

But overall we got through it pretty easily, and learned a couple of tricks we'd employ next time, if there ever were one. (If Z has her way, there will be. I told her to start saving.) The company has created a demo video which shows off how the site works. It's designed to instruct you in how to use their site, but basically, if they were relying on an instructional video to get customers through the process, they'd be sunk. The fact that the site is relatively simple to use is proof that they know this, and have worked hard to create a user experience with as few opportunities for confusion as possible. Anyway, here's that video, because it shows off the most surprising thing about the site - how well the company nailed the cute but hip crossover audience this product is perfect for. Accessorizing visual elements ranged from hearts and rainbows to glass-enclosed brains in fluid.


The only features that really should be there are the ability to resize and rotate design elements, at least those that wouldn't cause major problems for the software. These features would introduce a lot more creative freedom into the process of designing a Xoddo softie. You also can't import your own graphics, but I can see the problems with that and appreciate the limits they've set. (If you could upload a graphic, would you want a proof? Or expect them to check your design to make sure it would print properly?) More softie shapes would be nice, but those can come later.

To order, you have to create an account, so that your Xoddo figure can be saved in a personal gallery. I'd question the wisdom of making this a requirement - why not let business come through the revolving door of people who don't want to set up a profile? - but will leave that to the egghead business types. I'm less conservative about setting up random personal accounts than some, so it bothered me only on principle. I might also point out that making a big to-do about creating a gallery and saving your item there for future purchases might beg the question of what you have really accomplished in your design, and if it is not worth preserving for the ages, is it really worth having around? This could dissuade those casual consumers who might otherwise buy impulsively.

What you get

The dolls are pricey - $28 for a version that's 9" from toes to ear tips, or $18 for one about half that size. This may make Xoddo's offer a no-go for some consumers, but people have been paying $30+ for Build-A-Bears and their ilk for years. There is clearly a market out there, and these things have way more hip potential and are far more customizable. For people willing to invest in this kind of object, they need to trust that the quality of both the construction and the printing are high.

Fortunately, Xoddo has invested solidly in the manufacturing process. The colors printed on the fabric are bright and rich and the printing is crisp and clean - not quite as eye-popping as you see on a new T-shirt but far more than what you'd see in an iron-on transfer or from a custom T-shirt shop. And the quality of construction is great - the filling is even, the seams are very neat, and the whole thing is well-put-together. Unlike some competitors' products (which we're also very interested in getting our hands on) this dolly is not designed for short-term use.


Add to this the fact that Xoddo's manufacturing occurs entirely in the U.S., and I don't think $28 is unreasonable for the combined software and real-world service they're providing. Shipping is $4.95 unless you are buying 3 or more, in which case it jumps to $9.95, unless you are buying 9 or more, which takes you to $14.95. But if you have $252 to drop on customized plushies, I'd like to speak with you about some investment opportunities.

Turnaround on our doll was about two weeks, which was a morally reprehensible lapse in Z's opinion; I think she would have led a demonstration at the factory gates if we'd offered to drive her there. But the fact that she asked us, unprompted, at least three times over that period WHEN THAT DOLLY WAS GOING TO COME and WHY WASN'T IT HERE YET is a sign of how powerful the possibility of highly-customized, "user-generated" inanimate playmates can be to a young child. So if you have one (a young child, that is) and you're on the fence about whether it's worth the cost of admission, make sure to check out this site after the kids are in bed, and decide for yourself if you're going to show it to them.

We'll be donating the value of this toy to charity in accordance with our Keep No Stuff policy.

I recently ordered a package of a dozen poorly-made "Jumping Jellybean" wind-up toys from the Oriental Trading Company to use for DIY toy-building. Inspired by the TOMY Bumbling Boxing set we found at a garage sale a few weeks ago, Z and I cut the upper portions off a couple of the jellybeans (old scissors work fine), acquired the heads of some small discarded stuffed animals, and taped them up for painting, with adding arms to allow these two creatures to rush into each others' arms. We call them Hugging Robots.


This particular behavior is a favorite way for Z to greet a loved one who has been absent for some time. She doesn't just make a point of dropping what she is holding and racing into the arms of her beloved, who is expected to behave in a similar manner - she actively coaches them in advance over the phone that this is what they should do when they meet.