This belly of mine is getting big now (only a month or so to go until Baby #3 arrives!) and Peter and I are getting ready for our last big shopping show of the spring season!

This Friday, May 29, Kai Kids will be at the always fabulous Children’s Trunk Show at the Distillery District in Toronto.   This will be our third time at the Trunk Show and it is definitely our favourite shopping show: well organized, featuring gorgeous unique products for babies and kids, and a bunch of really nice parents: both vendors and customers.

We will be there with our Kai Kids booth and will be hauling our pretty, eco maternity and nursingwear so you can try it on,  our standard bestselling stock such as Bambu, Bamboosa and BabySoy, plus a bunch of excellent new items we’ve added to our online store:

•  handmade bamboo and organic cotton baby rattles
• new stainless steel feeding trays, perfect for baby
• organic mesh produce bags just in time for farmer’s markets
• natural, chemical-free hand sanitizer
• new spring styles of sweet and funky non-toxic baby and toddler shoes from

The Children’s Trunk Show is an exclusive shopping event featuring high-quality fashion, jewellery and art made by moms and geared exclusively towards kids and families. 50+ vendors are hand-selected to ensure a wide variety of goods—so you’re sure to find unique and useful gifts for all the children in your life in one place.

Come on out and join us this Friday, May 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Fermenting Cellar at the Distillery District, 55 Mill Street, Toronto. We’d love to see you there!

Check out the great Organic teething Bonbon review on Cool Mom Picks!

Cool Mom Picks - Bonbons for babies

I just entered Peter and I and our Kai Kids online boutique in a great contest going on over at Canadian parenting site, WeeWelcome.ca .

They are promoting the plethora of Canadian parentpreneurs out there, which is great, as we all could use a little help promoting ourselves and reaching new customers. Small business is a tough go, and many, like ours, can’t afford to do much, if any, advertising. We rely on word of mouth, or word of “mom” to reach new customers and sell enough product to keep our biz afloat!

If you are a reader of this blog and/or a Kai Kids customer, we’d really appreciate your vote!  All you have to do is go on over to weewelcome.ca and sign up, then vote for Kai Kids! WeeWelcome is a great resource with lots of articles, blogs, forums, groups and contests going on all the time, and a good way to connect with other parents in your city or neighbourhood.

So please vote for us!  We could win $20,000 of advertising in WeeWelcome’s web site, newsletter and printed guides (I can’t even get my head around that figure!) plus a trip to Club Med for our whole family (baby #3 is due soon, so we’ll need it!  We haven’t been anywhere outside Canada since before we got married and had Big Boy over five years ago).

Kids love painting, drawing and colouring, and even if your little ones spend a lot of time creating at home, they probably are also bringing home several masterpieces a week from school or daycare. We have a magnet board in our kitchen where I post the latest works of art from our two boys, but they do tend to pile up.

I used to sneak old paintings and those that weren’t my favourites into our recycling bin when my sons weren’t looking. But then I realized that their colourful, abstract (they are ages 2 and 4) paintings would make excellent wrapping paper for gifts!

This reuses their paintings (and gives them a thrill to see their masterpiece adorning a present for a friend’s birthday party etc.), reduces the amount of wrapping paper we consume (I haven’t bought any in two years!) and saves us money. And friends and family love the personal touch and think it’s quite fun to receive a present wrapped in children’s artwork.

Plus, I no longer have to feel guilty about not keeping every “unique: canvas they bring home!

Do you have any good ideas for reusing items around the home and encouraging your kids to reduce, reuse and recycle? I’d love to hear them.

If you live in and around Toronto, please come join us tomorrow at the Temple Sinai Nursery School’s 7th Annual Boutique Night in north Toronto.

We at Kai Kids will be there, offline, with our plethora of ethically-made, eco-friendly products for babies and toddlers, plus there will be many other companies selling women’s and children’s clothing, giftware, jewelry, stationery, personalized accessories, home decor, and more. Guests can also purchase raffle tickets as there are lots of prizes to be won.

Come on out to The Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto, 210 Wilson Ave., at Avenue and Wilson.

We hope to see you there!

To celebrate Earth Day today, I thought I’d share some excellent children’s books our family has read lately so you can try to make every day Earth Day in your household (we all know how little ones like to hear a story over and over again…).

One day earlier this spring I escaped for a bit of rare “me-time,” and headed to Chapters downtown, sans enfants. I scored several charming books for toddlers and preschoolers that I thought my two little green stars might like. Perhaps yours will, too.  Read the rest over at Canadian Family’s site, where I’m guest blogging this week!

Happy Earth Day everyone!

It’s only Tuesday, but it’s already been a busy week for Kai Kids. First we were featured in the Toronto Star’s Sunday edition, which brought us lots of online traffic and kept us busy shipping parcels off to new customers, yippee!

Plus,  I was invited to be the guest blogger over at Canadian Family’s blog for the week, in honour of Earth Day! My first post went up today: fun ways you can help your kids grow up green. Check it out, and if you haven’t already, spend some time on their site: it’s an excellent magazine and web resource for parents, full of Canadian content, and over the past few months, they’ve really beefed up their coverage of three of my favourite topics: the environment, mompreneurs and social media!

The past few months I’ve been exploring social media online and having a lot of fun with it, not to mention learning a lot!  And I’ve found that there are a lot of smart, funny mompreneurs out there to connect with. In fact, many of our Kai Kids suppliers are also blogging, tweeting and posting on Facebook.

One site that’s become part of my daily routine is Twitter. In fact, now it’s almost an addiction. It took me a while to understand it and get into it, but now I find it fun, useful and informative, as a parent, and an entrepreneur.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter ( I post about interesting articles I find, bits of my daily life, special sales and new arrivals of eco family products at Kai Kids), check it out: www.twitter.com/greenmum !

Check out The Toronto Star today for an excellent, personal piece by reporter Francine Kopun on trying to get through a typical family’s week without plastic. It sounds like a real challenge. Depressing really, to think of how reliant we’ve become on the stuff, and just how impossible it is to completely avoid it!

Kopun tries to avoid plastic food packaging and find plastic-free alternatives to tupperware containers, plastic bags and water bottles. And great news for us, she found some at our online eco store, Kai Kids!

Since the article hit the web and newsstands this morning, we’ve almost sold out of one of our newest green products: organic cotton mesh produce bags. They are washable, reusable and very handy for the grocery store or farmer’s market. If you came to Kai Kids searching for them and we don’t have enough of the size you would like, please email us at info@kaikids.com. We are now taking preorders for a new shipment due midweek!

A while back I sent one of my favourite Kai Kids products off to the ladies at Babyvibe and Kindervibe in BC (great newsletters for parents featuring tips and amazing new products, even if you aren’t lucky enough to live on the Best, er, West coast).  One of the moms behind the scenes, Nancy, has been trying them out for over a month with her family and loves them (I knew she would)!

Check out their review, which hit the ether earlier today via their newsletter and their website:

 ”not a school day has passed where it hasn’t been incorporated into this Kindervibe momma’s lunch-making duties!”

These handy stainless steel lunch containers are a great size for kids (small, med and large), and the company was started by by two moms here in Toronto! Being parents in biz ourselves, at Kai Kids, we are all about supporting other mompreneurs!