Busy Bodies

Kudos to last Sunday's New York Times Travel Section, which hipped us to the website Madallie.com, a children's travel store.

While you can't really reinvent the wheel when it comes to keeping kids occupied on the road, the fun products at Madallie are unique in style. They've got stuffed animals that are so plush and comfy that we're thinking of buying one for ourselves, and their magnetic games - slides and ladders and checkers are a few - put old games in fun new packaging.

Our real faves, though, aren't the games and finger puppets that are in abundance. Instead, we like the pseudo-grownup stuff, like the colorful luggage tags and passport holders. The travel journals also look really cool: they're great for helping kids keep track of what they've seen, done and God forbid, learned on their trips to Peru and Vietnam. There's even some funky stationery for camp or trips, a great tool to introduce kids to the dying art of writing letters instead of emails. (What? You mean people used to write on paper and mail it?)

Now when we prepare for our next trip we can make one online stop for all that "keep busy" stuff. Because isn't there enough stuff to do before traveling already?