Summer is birthday party season! The highest birthrates are during July, August, and September, so even though school may be out, your kid will be attending lots of classmates’ parties. (And, your kid might even have a special birthday of their own coming up soon, too.) So it’s a good idea to know what new toys are arriving during this ... Read More »

Being a staff member in a toy store is pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread – we get to play with, demonstrate, and recommend toys to our customers all day long! We love our jobs here at Magic Beans Fairfield (or, if you prefer, #mbfairfield), and we love introducing our customers to our favorites. We can’t always introduce ... Read More »

Hi everyone! I’m the head Toy Expert at Magic Beans – Fun Size, Manhattan’s new source for the best of the best playthings for ages 0-5. I’m a veteran Magic Beans employee, with years of experience in our Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline stores, so I’m bringing a ton of product knowledge to the scene – when you come to our ... Read More »

In a celebrated anecdote from his autobiography, famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright credited his childhood maple wood blocks (similar to these Standard Unit Blocks) for sparking his creativity. Wright wrote, “The maple-wood blocks are in my fingers to this day. These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects which were ever got into the architecture of the ... Read More »

Chances are, you’ve already heard how essential building play is to child development, and that material is very thoroughly covered elsewhere. So we’ll keep it simple: both boys and girls reap tremendous benefits from building play. The question is, what building toys will do the best job at getting their little brains humming and their creativity moving? It’s not hard ... Read More »

Picking out the very best toys is part experience, part instinct: some items are just obvious kid-magnets (if it lights up, they’ll probably love it); others just set off the seasoned toy buyer’s spider sense. Of course, we don’t sell toys that aren’t great – our toy selection is carefully curated to include a balance of classic toys and the ... Read More »

Every year, Magna-Tiles top our list of holiday best-sellers, and for good reason: they’re terrific fun for everyone, and are one of the rare toys that can captivate a preschooler or a teenager. But this year, they will be in very short supply — and for a very sad reason. Magna-Tiles are manufactured in Thailand, which has suffered catastrophic flooding ... Read More »