We attended The Toy Insider‘s Sweet Suite for the very first time this year. Then, we had the bonus opportunity of joining the Holiday of Play shortly thereafter! We actually created our kids holiday gift guide based on some of the things we were able to check out!
Sweet Suite is an invitation-only event normally held live in New York City. With the pandemic, The Toy Insider hosted Sweet Suite online with a virtual expo center and Zoom. We were able to meet with toy companies from all over the country to hear about the latest and greatest, just in time for holiday lists to begin! A big benefit to hosting the event online over the summer was that my children were able to join me for some meetings and it was a blast to watch them join in on the fun.
Activities
We decided to do things a little differently than we did last year at Holiday of Play at Home. We attended some demonstrations and participated in contests, like PlayMonster’s Disney Dress Up event.
We painted Creative Roots stepping stones with Horizon Group and later on, we even made SNOW and a personal favorite of mine, water beads!
We loved seeing the other creators and their kids learn about toys with us. It’s fun to see the kids in all of us but it’s definitely more fun to see how excited all of the actual children get about the new toys. Plus, it really helps them to formulate their Christmas lists!
The TOYS!
Let’s get to my favorite part!
My little man an I spent the longest time in the Pixicade room, learning all about creating our own video game with Pixicade. We were both completely enamored with the idea of making our own character, mission, obstacles, etc. and we definitely put this one on our holiday gift guide!
Make It Real Color Fusion Nail Polish Maker allows you to create your own nail polish colors. You can even match them to something specific using the app. My ten year old found this especially spectacular!
My girls already love LOL Dolls so it was no surprise that they adored the new MGA LOL Color Change Surprise and we promptly sent one to my niece for her birthday!
Honey Bee Acres drew the attention of our youngest! The figures are SO CUTE and she loves little playsets.
I love bubbles so the idea of bubbles you can eat was so exciting to me! We ended up getting our own BubbleLick to try and we just loved them!
Vibe Girls are beautiful dolls worth collecting but what really appealed to us were the purposes behind them! They are truly meaningful and that’s why they also made it to our holiday gift guide.
Tamagotchi and Digimon were all the rage when we grew up so you know what, it’s hard to tell whether the kids or Hubs and I were more excited that Tamagotchi and Digimon will be big again this year!
Blue Marble in general is INCREDIBLE. They have so many educational toys that are so entertaining, the kids completely forget that they’re learning anything! We play with their National Geographic kits and Blockaroo and love them everything they do!
I was also lucky enough to win a SWAG BAG from the Holiday of Play so we got some more goodies to share with the kiddies! Inside it, we discovered Cats vs. Pickles, some of our favorite little squishy friends!
THE GIFT GUIDE
As I mentioned, these lovely conventions helped us to plan out our gift guide for kids this year! Being able to see toys first-hand helped us to choose what would fit best in our household and hopefully, yours too! You can see our holiday gift guide on the holiday gift guide tab here on the blog or by clicking here!