SpanglishBaby Gets a Sister

Ana Lilian has been toying with the idea for a while now and, at this point, I guess there’s no better way to celebrate our SIX month anniversary than by launching our brand new sister site: SpanglishBabyFinds!

¿Qué es? A fun and honest review site where we will tell you about all the cool things–music, DVDs, books, clothing, toys, websites, etc–we find related to raising bilingual + bicultural children. The idea is to share with you all the great stuff made with Latinos in mind to help us all through our bilingual journey.

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you know we’ve done our share of reviews and giveaways. Lately, we’ve been finding a bunch of new Latino or Latino-geared businesses which make products specifically for those of us raising bilingual kids. So, we want SpanglishBabyFinds to become the go-to-site if you’re looking for these kind of cool stuff. You can read a much more detailed description of our sister site by actually going there.

To celebrate our launch, we’re excited to announce we’ve partnered up with Ingenio, a brand new, truly bilingual toy maker which is introducing exclusively through SpanglishBabyFinds 10 exciting products we think you will love . When we were first contacted by this innovative company, we were eager to check out what their toys and games were all about since, as you probably know, it’s not easy to find educational and affordable, yet fun toys to help us in the process of raising bilingual kids.

Starting today and for the next two weeks we will review and give away one of Ingenio’s toys every day over at SpanglishBabyFinds. But before you go there to read about the first toy we’re reviewing, I just wanted to share with you a little bit about the ingenious Ingenio company and their 10 bilingual toys.

From their website:

“Ingenio is the first bilingual educational toys and games brand in the USA. Our toys and games foster bilingual learning at an early age through hands-on learning techniques. The following are the key attributes of every product under the Ingenio brand:

• Bi-lingual
• Educational
• Innovative
• Affordable (8 products less than $ 12.99)
• Fun to Play
• Durable & Safe
• For preschool and early school years (3-8 years old)”

When I got Ingenio’s package in the mail, I was pretty interested in finding out if the latter descriptions actually fit their products. I already liked what I had seen on their website, but I knew the true test would be putting the products in the hands of those they were intended for: los niños.

Vanessa thought it was her birthday all over again, ha! We opened all of the toys as carefully as possible and I just sat back and observed her reaction. She began her exploration with the Alphabet Learning Cards and quickly started calling out the names of what she saw on them–in Spanish, yay!

We then moved on to the North America Map Puzzle. She really liked this one, as did I. The pieces are big and sturdy. Although she is too little to do it on her own, with my help she was eager to put it together and then I was able to show her where she was born (Colorado), where her hermano mayor was born (Miami) and where her Papito was born (Puerto Rico.)

Later on, we invited some of our friends from our bilingual playgroup over to the house so the kids could play with the toys. They were pretty much a hit with everybody (both niños + mamis), although maybe they will be put to better use as the children get older–which, in fact, is one of the goals of Ingenio: for the toys to grow with your children.

In the days to follow, both Ana Lilian and I–as well as a couple of other mamás–will be telling you more about each of the 10 products we got to review over at SpanglishBabyFinds. Just so you know, these toys are only available through Amazon right now, which means you can get them by going to La Tiendita.

Plus, as I’ve already mentioned, you’ll get a chance to get your hands on them through our daily giveaways in the next ten days. So be sure to visit us for your own opportunity to check out these innovative and affordable juguetes!

Make sure you don’t miss any of our finds and giveaways by signing up to receive free updates of SpanglishBabyFinds via email or RSS.