These toys help kids learn to think in new ways, problem solve and are also fun. Of course these are the attributes that the serious traveler must have. They need to view the world through a new lens, navigate their way around language barriers, new places and new rules.

Thames & Kosmos
I Dig It! Rocks — Real Minerals Excavation Kit

This is a fabulous activity to do with your kids, it’s simple, fun and educational. It is a fun way to teach patience, foster curiosity and an activity that can be replicated at archaeological dig sites around the world. In the kit, kids can emulate geologists and dig up five different minerals from out of the soft plaster blocks. Included is the name and characteristics of the minerals and where they came from.

Tinkering Labs
Electric Motors Catalyst

Tinkering Labs’ Electric Motors Catalyst is for kids 8 and older, and it  focuses on creativity and problem-solving capabilities. It allows kids to build doodling robots, power electric model cars and add motors to legos. The kit comes with easy to understand instruction and is filled with opportunities for kids to become inventors of their own creations.

Buy from Tinkering Labs ($55) and Amazon ($59)

Playing Cards

A simple old time past time of playing cards is always entertaining and the award-winning card company Hoyle®, which created games like Go Fish has now created a new line of cards that teach different skill sets.

Check out is Hoyle Monkey, May I?^TM helps kids 4 to 6 years old to learn about making good choices, self-control, and self-awareness. Another one that is educational is Hoyle Catch’N Fish^TM   which reinforces simple addition and subtraction while helping kids 4 to 6 years old to understand values.

Magformers

For your budding builder and architect, a favorite toy that happens to be engaging for adults too is Magformers which is a magnetic construction toy. It comes in a variety of styles from simple blocks to ones that create specific items. So if your child loves to build cars and trucks check out the Amazing Rescue 50-Piece Set. It is a Rescue 50-Piece Set where kids can build a fire station and a fire truck. The Rescue set is a 50 piece set  that comes with 24 magnetic pieces, 2 characters and emergency vehicle accessories and much more.

Spring Ages 3+ MSRP $59.99

Thames & Kosmos
KF Coding and Robotics

Thames and Kosmos knows how to make science interesting. With Sammy a cute little peanut butter and jelly sandwich they teach new skills as he is actually a robot that teaches coding principles and skills to children in grades K-2.

What I like is that there is no need for a tablet, smartphone, or computer to program this robot; programs are created by simply laying down a sequence of physical code cards. As the robot drives over the code cards, an OID optical scanner on the bottom of the robot reads the code cards one by one and loads the program.  It has plenty of options and is creative and fun. MSRP: $129.95

Green Toys Tide Pool Bath Set

Green Toys are made in the USA- and are quality, sturdy, well made products. Their trucks are creative, fun and one of their newer products the Green Toys Tide Pool Bath set is perfect for the bath, beach or pool.

Goliath
Phlat Ball V3

Want to learn about gravity? The Plat Ball is a fun way to do it. This ball transforms from a flying disc to a catchable ball via a suction mechanism in the middle so it stays squished down. Its fun and funny — and no matter the age it will make you smile.

SMART PIXELATOR

Create a pixelated, beaded masterpieces out of any photo they have on a smart device with the smART Pixelator, from Flycatcher. Creations are made out of colorful iron-together beads! The toy also comes with a storage tray and organizer for your beads. And while there is also a tool to help you pick up the beads, you need little fingers and lots of patience — which travelers always must have.  The smART Pixelator comes with an SD card with preloaded projects,. A way to combine travel with this toy is to connect it to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth and use your own photos of say the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Harbor bridge and create those images. Using the smART Pixelator app, kids can pick any design from the activities loaded into the app, or engineer their own project using any photo from their device.

Thames & Kosmos
Crystals, Rocks and Minerals

IT is a big world around us filled with beautiful rocks and the minerals that form them.  If one digs deeper, there is a fascinating crystal structures for these minerals. The kit provides a way to learn about  the chemistry of crystals and the geological science behind rock formation with more than 18  different projects such as building a three-dimensional geometric models of common crystals shapes including octahedrons, tetrahedrons, and rhomboids. Learn where and when to search for your own minerals in nature to grow your collection. Specimens include amethyst, rose quartz, flint, quartz, amazonite, apatite, mookaite, labradorite, pyrite, and a desert rose. Ages: 6 & Up. MSRP: $54.95.

Redneck Roadkill
Raging Bull Pickup Truck

A fun throwback car with a fully functional remote control that is sure to make you smile. It looks like an old school pickup truck with a weathered body and fenders, beefy tires and working suspension. It comes with roadkill pieces that will give your youngster a chance to use their hand-eye coordination to try to knock them down or weave between them. It also includes Roadkill games with instructions such as Split the Squirrel – Grill the Armadillo – Plunk the skunk.

This fully functional battery operated remote controller drives forward, back, left and right to tickle tight turns and smoke straight-a-ways.

The post Toys that Inspire Imagination appeared first on Traveling Archive.

I imagine most of our lives are a series of awakenings.  One of my big ones came during my later college days.  By the time I entered my senior year at San Diego State I was a decent athlete and grades in school came easily. Actually, too easily. I spent much of my time at the beach when real students studied. My years in college were fun and I squeaked by doing almost no homework. But I did have a good tan, remember I am from California. When it comes to trendsetters we may be the undisputed world champions. We have the honor of being the home of the Christian Surfer Association. Yes, the only group in the world that addresses God as the Great Gnarly Dude. So, go light on me.

One problem with not applying myself was that even in the classes I liked I didn’t learn much since I was goofing off most of the time. My major was Industrial Arts. That is the educational term. It was really “shop class.”  Woodworking became my specialty.  I still remember my big assignment in Wood 101.  We could make any project we wanted with one square foot of lumber. I decided to make a cutting board, one-foot square, and one inch thick.  How is that for imagination?  But it gets better.  The undertaking stretched into nine weeks. As I hinted at I was not really strong in applying myself to anything except surfing.

My only creative moment was to get special permission to add an additional type of wood. The finished cutting board was laminated with alternating stripes of walnut and maple and had four tiny wooden feet on the bottom and two large clunky metal handles on the top. It looked like a zebra that had gone through a trash compactor. You are probably convinced at this time that I was into drugs. No, I just didn’t know what I was doing. But I did like woodwork.

If anyone with a sense of design had seen that monstrosity I made I might have been burned at a stake in public. Today I don’t know what finally happened to that awful thing. I gave it to my mother and I never saw it again after that. I think she made sure it was well buried in the trash can so the garbage truck would take it. Yes, the mother who still had my mosaic duck from ninth grade art class reached her tolerance level and my college masterpiece was no more. I am telling this story to give the background for what happened a few years later that changed my life and my self-confidence.

One of my neighborhood buddies got a job at a small custom furniture shop when I was in my last part of college. I can’t really tell you if I was a junior or senior because I just meandered through school, like life, and I never knew what I was. One day I took my last class and I was done. Now, back to my friend who got that job.  I was jealous and begged him to ask if I could work at that same shop. I have no idea what kind of story he told the boss but he hired me. I was a total dweeb (California word meaning “mindless LOOSER”). I hadn’t learned much in college except what the tide and surf tables meant and my woodworking major had left me mostly uneducated. But as I said, I liked woodworking. Surprisingly, the idea of working in a woodworking shop interested me and I actually started applying myself. I only hoped I would get a few skills before they discovered what they had hired and take me out behind the building and shoot me (sometimes known as acute lead poisoning). I tried my best and started to improve. They gave me simple jobs at first, which was very fortunate. Lee, the owner, was a very encouraging and tolerant person. He saw hope in the dweeb. His trust in me made me want to try harder. He was an exceptional man, but this particular story is really about a guy named Doug.

Turning Point

Doug was different from the crowd I ran with. He didn’t have a tan so I was suspicious from the start. He was focused and always seemed to know what he was doing and what he would be doing next. My life was like driftwood. Doug’s life was driven by vision and artistic balance. I envied him. Doug was a graduate from the same college I attended but he had paid attention. He was a few years older and many years more mature. He was one of the first Christians I ever met and he was a master craftsman. He was a man going somewhere and I hadn’t even looked at the map.

Well, one day towards the close of a work day he asked if I wanted to join him after we shut down. He was going to stay for an extra hour to make a gift for his wife. I hadn’t been married very long at that point and he was thoughtful enough to include me in his project. He told me I could make one for my wife.  I asked him what he was going to make in one hour. He said, “A cutting board.”  I think I stopped breathing. I stared blankly. It was as Yogi Berra said, “Déjà vu all over again.”  “Did you say one hour, Doug?”  “Are they going to have handles on the top, feet on the bottom and look like a squashed zebra?” Could a cutting board be made in less than nine weeks?  So, I agreed mostly out of curiosity. Anyway, if my wife didn’t like it, she could give it to my mom. She needed a new lid for her trash can.

That evening between five and six PM my life changed. Doug had designed (a formerly unknown word to me) a simple Danish modern, teardrop-shape cutting board made from teak with a rosewood strip in it and a small rawhide hanging strap on the end.  It was elegant and beautiful. And the food wouldn’t get wrapped around the handles. We made two in one hour. The shop had a special glue and a radio-wave drier which helped the job be completed in a short time. When the boards were finished we oiled them with vegetable oil and took them home to our wives.

I imagine Doug calmly and confidently handed his to his wife without much of a thought. But I had a different experience. I trembled as I drove home and began to feel something strange happening. It was something I had never felt before. It was my brain waking up. It was my life waking up. I didn’t even care if the surf was up.

Have you ever had a secret you carried that made you want to burst? That described me that night. When I walked into the house with a plain plastic bag holding the little masterpiece I must have been beet red and my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. My wife noticed my unusual blowfish countenance and said: “What’s up.” I said, “Oh, nothing much.”  What’s in the bag?” “Oh, it’s just a little something I made at the shop tonight for you.”  “Really, let me see it.”  “Ohhh, OK, here.” Silence. Lots of silence. Birth is a stunning moment.

I made that cutting board in one hour. It was beautiful. I did it.  What did my wife say?  I can’t remember because I was staring at what I had done and was even more amazed than she was.  She probably said something like, “You incredible hunk of a man, this is your lucky night.” But all I could see was what I was able to do in such a short time.  It was a metamorphosis, dweeb to achiever.  A mentor had dragged my sorry carcass into the light and I was never the same after that. Doug, you have no idea what that cutting board did to me that night.

Today I look back at an incredible journey. I became a building contractor, firefighter, cabinetmaker, Bible teacher, and author.  I have traveled to all continents except Antarctica teaching pastors and Christian workers around the world.  When we worked with impoverished churches we designed a church-based enterprise program to help them become self-supporting when formerly they had no hope of surviving. My wife and I developed a papermaking project from banana rope fragments and today we have designed and completed an amazing pulp mill we built from donated steam boiler equipment and discarded diesel engines from old buses. Churches were supported by the beautiful handmade paper products and herbal handmade soap that we marketed all over the USA. There were also community development and medical programs for the most impoverished.  Yep, this old dweeb got his life together and I can trace my current personality and skills to that cutting board and that night of awakening. I was a goof-off surfer and woodworker wannabe.  Today I have numerous skills and have directed several Christian agencies. My wife and I have raised five children that surprisingly have similar traits. Of course, my wife would add, “One hunk of a man” so I have to put that on the list at her insistence.

What happened to me? Doug showed me what I could be. Thanks, Doug.  Doug was a mentor. Mentors change people.  We all need mentors. We need to be mentors. My adventurous life journey is what it is today because of mentors. Mentors introduced me to my Savior. They made me an upper and not a downer. They made a can-do person. They helped me discover my spiritual gift of vision and to develop it. They showed me the joy of creativity, which helped me find solutions in the hard times. Other mentors modeled a life that was victorious in suffering. They were pathfinders. Others helped me lay a strong foundation that would stand against the onslaught of a terminal disease. My awakening happened when a guy took me aside one night for one hour and showed me I was worth something.

I have tried to imagine where I would be today if I had not spent that one hour in the cabinet shop that night with Doug. I would probably be trying to pay for cancer treatments by marketing cutting boards with handles on the top.

One post script is necessary.  A month ago a local church contacted me and asked if I could help them with a program that helps at-risk kids.  It is called Children Are People.  They had heard I had a cabinet shop and they wanted to have me help them do small project with wood. I asked how much time would I have for the lesson.  They apologized that I only had ONE HOUR.  I told them I just might have the perfect project we could do in that hour.

The post Life Lesson 3: Handles on Top of a Cutting Board? appeared first on Traveling Archive.

We all have times in our lives that we would describe as extraordinary moments.  A day begins as normal and then suddenly something changes it. Today, I can barely tell this story without tears welling up in my eyes. It is interesting that before I trusted Christ as Savior over 48 years ago, I never cried.  My heart was a chunk of rock. My poor young wife had married a stoic and had been learning that I was detached from emotion. I still remember the night I surrendered to the Lord.  The floodgates opened for the first time in my life. God had put a heart of flesh into Old Granite.  I still have a softened heart today.  I don’t mean I break down and weep when I read the price of soup in a supermarket isle, but I am more sensitive now to human suffering and to things of extraordinary beauty.

One of the most difficult things we face as overseas missionaries is that we miss family events that most people take for granted. When our children returned home for higher education they were pretty much on their own. We gave them roots but the day came when we had to give them wings. But it isn’t easy when they are  7,000 miles away. This event happened when phone calls very costly and mail could take a month.  And as incredible as our children are they still sometimes forget how to communicate when they leave home. Too many distractions I guess.

Our second eldest, Dan, began his journey back home by being accepted at UCLA.  Dan was a great athlete and had been accepted to join the world-famous UCLA volleyball team. It was historically the top team in the country. Although no scholarships were available when he applied he was still invited based on a video we had taken of him his senior year at his high school, Faith Academy, in the Philippines.  Because the volleyball season was not during our two-month furlough schedule we never were able to see a volleyball game he played in during his four years at UCLA. We got an occasional video of a TV broadcast and saw some photos in a monthly magazine but that was it. It was excruciating for us.  I asked God to let us see a game one day but that prayer seemed like it would never be answered. Then the end of Dan’s collegiate volleyball career was at hand.  The team had gone four years without a national championship, the longest in its history.  But we could tell by what we read that UCLA was having a great year. Our son had set a kill record for the school which is no small achievement for a school like that.  The national championships were to be held at home court, Pauley Pavilion.  This was to be their year.  And as usual, our 2-month short furlough was timed just wrong. We had three children still in the Philippines and had to stay in the local school system calendar. We could not afford to go to the USA and then fly back and then one month later fly back again for furlough. It was out of the question.  It hurt so much.

During those years I did a lot of training for the Bible League and I traveled a lot.  I received a message from them that they wanted me to go to Khuzestan to train some pastors and then on to Mexico to help with issues that had come up in their Latin American program. They also wanted me to meet with a person in Tijuana.  Tijuana!  That was the border town next to our home city, San Diego. The trip to San Diego would be two days before the NCAA preliminaries and then NCAA finals would be the following week!  I asked if I could stay the extra week in the San Diego area and attend the National Volleyball finals. They didn’t care since the ticket price was the same and I could even stay at our home since a renter had just moved out and it was empty.  It was perfect. Well, almost.  My wife, Janet, could not go but at least Dad could see his son play for the first time in four years. God had answered my prayer, at least half of it.

UCLA slaughtered everyone at the prelims. They were amazing. My heart was in my stomach all night and the next night. Dan was a great player, even better than what I envisioned.  I read the articles in Volleyball Monthly (we subscribed to it just to get news of him).   But even better, he was a great person.  He never did get a scholarship. He earned his spot all the way while some of the scholarship players would sit on the bench. He spent his years at UCLA getting up at 3 AM and driving a bread truck to pay the bills. TV announcers who heard about it gave him his nickname which stuck with him for those years, “the Muffin Man.”   During his senior year, he rented space under a piano in someone’s living room. That is where he slept part of that year. It kept costs down.  Maybe spending time on the mission field helped him adapt. When he graduated from UCLA with degrees in history and international economics he had paid his own way through, had no school debts, owned two cars, had money in the bank and was one of the top volleyball players in the country.

Back to our story. I got to be there the night UCLA qualified for the NCAA finals which were one week away. I just had to make one of those expensive phone calls to Janet in Manila and share the event. We cried together on the phone. She was so happy. I was too but sad at the same time that she had to miss this great event.

The week moved slowly and the big weekend arrived. The day of the finals was on a Friday.  I had to make an early morning visit again to that missionary in Tijuana where I stayed until about noon.  When I drove back across the border in Mexico I knew I had to rush. I still had to return to our San Diego area home and pack up my stuff since I would be flying out of Los Angeles International airport a few days later, the day after the finals.  So, I headed home to pack my bags, and then get on the road in my rented car to drive the three hours to UCLA, eat dinner, and get to the first semi-finals. I pulled up at my house and looked at my watch as I jogged to the front door and ran inside.  But something was different.

Janet was standing there.  I stood there stunned. I broke down in tears. It was one of our longest hugs on record.  For three hours as we drove to UCLA, she told me the story. After my phone call the week before, she went to our mission’s annual conference. She told the group how much she missed being with me and Dan in this great moment of his life.  One of the missionaries, Dan’s former coach, Tine Hardeman, said to her, “Why don’t you just sell something and go. There are some things in life you just don’t want to miss.”  It was a light that needed to go on. In the next day, she managed to sell all our living room furniture. Our sofa set was really nice. We had saved our money for years to have it custom made of rattan. That sold quickly. She booked a flight and was standing in our home when I got there. She had arrived one hour before I walked in the door and had no idea where I was or how she would get to UCLA and then I walked in.

I had seen Dan the week before but she still hadn’t seen him for two years. We had so much to talk about for three hours. I told him that there was a good reason he was a two-time All American and had set a record at UCLA.  I knew the next two days would be really special for her. That alone made my weekend one of the most memorable in my life.  We got to UCLA and I took her to her favorite Chinese fast food chain which was on campus and bought her a meal she loves. She couldn’t eat one bite. She was so nervous to see Dan. We left and I tossed the plate of food in the trash can. We had a son to meet.  I had called ahead to tell him Mom was here so he wouldn’t be too emotionally shocked.

What a night.! UCLA annihilated their opponent. Dan introduced us around to players, coaches, sports announcers.  Dan was a champion. Dan was a hero. Dan was our son. I had no buttons left on my shirt.  We love our kids all the time. They don’t have to excel to earn our love. But I must admit that a night like that is unbelievably special. We were to eventually go to two Olympics and watch this kid compete with the world’s best. But as amazing as those Olympic events were I still go back to the NCAA finals as the most meaningful.  There was so much drama, sacrifice and emotion involved.

The next night the finals took place. Our humble little missionary kid son had over 40 kills and spent most of the night in the air. His 42-inch vertical jump was quite intimidating to his opponents. It was a night of glory. UCLA won it in straight sets, their first NCAA championship in four years. Dan was the standout player. We were the standout parents.  At least that is how we felt.  When it was over we mingled around the floor talking to people and Dan introduced us to a writer with Sports Illustrated who interviewed us.  An article appeared next month in that magazine reporting on the championship and focusing on Dan and it told this amazing story of Dan’s crazy Mom who sold her living room furniture to see her son play volleyball on the night of his life. I know it was the night of our life.

On the flight back to the Philippines I still had tears in my eyes. My wife asked if I was alright. I said, “I’m fine. I am just trying to figure out where we will sit in our house for the next year!”

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