Our Family

Our family welcomes you to this website as we share our private lives and our love for toys. We are a unique, sometimes crazy, mostly happy and always amusing bunch!

Our story begins with my wife and I meeting and falling in love at the High School of Art & Design in New York City during the winter of 1989, evolving over the years through multiple incarnations of our relationship, getting married, adopting my sister and finally having a boy and a girl. We worked hard to save money for our first house, lost a bunch when we sold it during the housing crash, and got a great deal on our new country home in the mountains!

We’re fortunate to be blessed with such a beautiful family and home, but like you and any family, we work hard, struggle with balancing family and life, enjoy fleeting moments of happiness and suffer the hardships of loss. As I write this page in between job hunting and applications, I’m experiencing the magic of unemployment along with millions of Americans during a difficult time in our country. Moreover, the launch of this site came just a week before I lost my father to humanity’s ultimate fate.

My apologies for bringing you down! But I share this with you because as I wrote the pages and articles on this site, I found myself noticing the tenderness and deep love I feel for our family and the meaningfulness of this exercise. Commenting on how the toys are affecting our children has ultimately become a diary of our family’s private moments as seen and interpreted through my personal human experience. This era of vulnerability and introspection has me appreciating the sanctity of our children, our marriage and the ability to feel profound love while celebrating glimpses of joy so bright and powerful that they momentarily blind us from the hardships of living.

In celebration of that statement, we introduce you to our family from youngest to us:

Our Daughter: Delivered by her mother and father under urgent circumstances in a New Jersey hotel room, she is the baby of the family and our delicate little flower. Amazingly cute, she is brawny and tough while at the same time chewy and affectionate.

Our Son: Our first born and only boy in a house of four women, he is my buddy and son. Greeting his birth in the hospital room was the first time I experienced a miracle. His crystal blue eyes are centered by perpetually dilated pupils with the ability to stare straight into our eyes and touch the soul.

Our Sister: Our eldest girl, she entered our lives in a desperate state ruptured by parental drug addiction and domestic violence. Followed by years of court appearances, tense visitation rights and emotional unrest, she catapulted us into immediate parenthood and taught us how to be nurturing humans years before we were ready to have children of our own.

Our Marriage: Our union was an expression of immediate love complicated by the immaturity of youth. Our relationship existed in three incarnations in high school during the late 1980s, then later as friends exploring New York City’s nightlife and art scene in the early to mid 1990s, and finally as a couple through engagement and marriage since the dawn of the 21st century.