#122: Ultimate Kids Gift Guide: Our Families' Top Picks for Unforgettable Fun

Ever wondered what makes a kids' gift totally awesome?

In this special episode we're  sharing our families' all-time most successful gifts. We're straying from the usual formula for a bit to bring you the ultimate gift guide packed with unique kids gifts and guaranteed family fun. Listen in to see if you find any golden nuggets your family can enjoy for years to come. Let's do this!

https://www.habitmasters.com/blog/kids_gift_guide
ACTION STEP FROM THE EPISODE
Check out our Kids Gift Guide that's packed with links and gift ideas our families have loved.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• The Ultimate Kids Gift Guide
• Need more kid experience ideas? Check out these blogs for even more great family fun ideas https://selfsufficientkids.com/experience-gifts-for-kids/
  https://modernminimalism.com/best-experience-gifts-for-kids/
  https://www.lovelyluckylife.com/experience-gift-ideas-for-kids/

KICK YOUR WEEK OFF RIGHT!
SUBSCRIBE TO THE FREE MAGIC MONDAY NEWSLETTER
Subscribe to the Magic Monday newsletter to power up your week with our best tips and tools for crushing your goals.

OUR MISSION
Our mission is to help one million strivers take consistent action on their goals and live a life of greater freedom and contribution.

P.S. If you liked this episode please consider sharing it with someone and/or leaving us a review on your favorite podcast app.

Transcript

Sheldon Mills: 0:00

Welcome to Habit Masters. I'm Sheldon. I'm Jeff. And this is a departure somewhat or a normal episode. This is , a best kids gift guide of all the greatest hits that Jeff and I, and our families have done.

Jeff Corrigan: 0:13

Yes. And it's cool because. Generally, the best gifts guy is like, here's a bunch of random toys that are sponsored. Like, no, this is stuff that our families have fallen in love with, has been impactful, and that they continue to use over and over again. So this, it's not like your standard gifts. A lot of these are a little bit unique, I would say. Some of them are standard, but the majority of them are, are unique gifts. Yeah, that you wouldn't just off the top of your head think of. So hopefully, and Sheldon's really good about this kind of stuff. So I'm excited for his list.

Sheldon Mills: 0:45

This is accompanying a blog post where we've written a lot of this stuff out. So you have links and things like that, but there's some few things you probably won't get into here also about how to find hopefully the best deals and kind of some things to watch out for and why. So we want to talk, you know, maybe not go through everything, but probably quite a bit of it of why these are the best hits for our families and why you might want to get this for your kids or

Jeff Corrigan: 1:10

grandkids. Exactly. So if you are interested in any of this, Go to the blog that accompanies this episode, and we'll have a link in the show notes, of course, and you can click on the links. We'll have most of the things linked or you can find it via websites and things like that. So pretty exciting.

Sheldon Mills: 1:27

Exactly. So, I think to kick this off, we came up with a few categories of different types of toys that most of these things fell in, and the first one is what we're calling open systems and then classic toys, then unique toys. That experiences and there's some kind of random thoughts Some

Jeff Corrigan: 1:45

random thoughts so explain to these guys open systems and we're going to jump into that, right?

Sheldon Mills: 1:52

I think when you think of open systems, there's the classic ones that everybody knows which would be duplo and lego, right? It's a open ended enough that there's tons of room for creativity and imagination We put I put lego and duplo on here because we have tons of duplos and tons of legos like way too many Yes, yeah In fact, I put a couple Instagram links in here to our posts of some, a couple of giant creations that we did. One for submission to Mark Rober for a contest that my, my kids did. And then, you know, like we've done Duplo towers to the ceiling and crashed them.

Jeff Corrigan: 2:30

Well, and if you've never, if you're, if you're being introduced to Mark Rober for the first time, go check him out. Your kids will absolutely love him. So

Sheldon Mills: 2:38

yes, I should talk about that a little bit here. So we'll get to that. So maybe that's the first one that's like the easiest thing to think of when you think of an open system. Another one that I put on here was one called I think the company's called MakeDo. I actually, I thought it was a Mikado for a really long time until my wife was like, MakeDo. I'm like, what's that? She's like, that's the name. I'm like, oh my gosh, I just have this thing. I

Jeff Corrigan: 3:04

love those moments when you're like, I've been saying that wrong for years now. Okay.

Sheldon Mills: 3:09

and what this is, it's like cardboard box building on steroids. Right? It's these little, I don't know how they fasteners many infections. Yeah, yeah. These fasteners that these, these screws that screw in, you punch the hole in it and they screw cardboard together and it's almost just like, I mean, you could use duct tape. But my kids have literally gone through like rolls of duct tape, building things like that, and this is reusable. Yeah. It's stronger. They're actually really, really cool. And in the link in our, in the blog post, I put a link to some instructables and a make do hub of like all these ideas of creations that people have done. There are some really, really cool things. This is one of those things that It's not like it's out all the time, but every couple of months these get pulled out and we raid the local recycling bin for like a dozen giant cardboard boxes and just go to town.

Jeff Corrigan: 4:06

That's awesome. Well, I was just going to say, yeah, so if you've ever been jealous of like Calvin and Hobbes, how Calvin makes all that stuff out of cardboard, here you go, this is your chance, right? You can do it. To produce a rocket ship.

Sheldon Mills: 4:19

And then I've also 3D printed things like door hinges and stuff like that. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit too, 3D printers, but there's a lot of 3D printed stuff to kind of like add to it.

Jeff Corrigan: 4:30

Yes,

Sheldon Mills: 4:30

that is awesome. Hmm, let's see, should we just go down the list? Or do you wanna, do you wanna take a couple? I'd say let's

Jeff Corrigan: 4:36

go down the list here. For the most part, a lot of this stuff is Sheldon's because he was writing the blog post. I just added a few nuggets from my family. And Sheldon is very, he's like a It's such a great dad. And so like helps us kids be super creative and the dad, all of us wish we could be to our kids, you know, as far

Sheldon Mills: 4:53

as like, I like the rabbit hole down and stuff like this, I guess.

Jeff Corrigan: 4:57

So yeah, it's awesome. It's a cool, cool thing. I told him actually, I was like, you should just start a podcast. It's all about like how to make your kids lives amazing. And build their creativity. So this is the first episode of that series. If we switch from habit masters to super dad, that's going to be it. So yeah, Duplo Lego, you had these on here, Legos, right? I mean, there's the sets that you can buy with all the little characters, like I've been playing with Lego since I was a tiny kid. Right. And I'm talking both kinds, the Duplo kind all the character kinds like back in the day, they didn't have anything licensed. Right. So it was just like, Lego's own versions of like snow space characters and things like that. This is the eighties space, man. If you ever watched the Lego movie, but now they have pretty much anything you can imagine, right? All the star Wars, all the Ninja Turtles, like would have been my absolute dream when I was a kid. So. They aren't cheap by any

Sheldon Mills: 5:51

stretch. I got a little story about Legos for you. Yeah, do it. I put a link in the blog post, but I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's called Shop Goodwill. It's like the online version of the Goodwill stores, you know, people donate stuff. And it used to be one of the cheapest ways to kind of get like these bulk Legos and Duplos. And me and my neighbor who's big into Lego. I say Legos, but the correct name is Lego, right? Yes. Lego Masters is one of my kids favorite, favorite shows. It's a great show, by the way. But they, we found one. It was a, a 456 pound pallet of Lego. And it's a bidding system. So we kind of set ourselves a limit. Long story short. We ended up buying it for like 1, 200. It cost another 350 to, you know, do a shipping container. It was literally a pallet, right? Yeah. And we had these hundreds of pounds of Lego that we, started sorting through, but after a while the sorting became a lot less. That's a lot to try and go through. Long story short, each of us probably We kept, you know, 150 pounds each and we pulled out maybe probably half of the mini figs that were in there and sold those online and recouped almost our entire cost. Wow. And

Jeff Corrigan: 7:22

So was it just a bunch of Yeah, like

Sheldon Mills: 7:25

mishmash of, of every set sets, sets of Legos had been thrown into this, this giant palette box of, of Lego and it was kind of cool. It was a lot of work, you know., we probably wouldn't do it again, , but you

Jeff Corrigan: 7:37

recouped your cost, but not your time,

Sheldon Mills: 7:38

literally. Yeah. Yeah. It was literally a way to get hundreds of mini figs, maybe thousands if you could, if you counted all of them. Right. Hundreds of mini figs, each and probably a couple hundred pounds. Keep that much, maybe a hundred, a hundred plus pounds of Lego that, I mean, I, we have so much Lego. I don't need to buy any more Lego

Jeff Corrigan: 8:00

ever again. Oh man. That's awesome. Wow. I did not. I've never heard that story.

Sheldon Mills: 8:06

So,

Jeff Corrigan: 8:06

okay. So everybody knows Lego right? And you've used Lego and you've probably seen Lego. So we're not going to dive into Lego. It's more interesting stuff, but that is a very. That story was legendary. So if you want, you know, 400 pounds of Lego, go for it. Go bid yourself into it. A pallet of the lego for 1500 bucks Which is a great deal if you think of that you can spend 1500 bucks on like what 10 sets so

Sheldon Mills: 8:36

Yep. Yeah, I got a couple more and then I know you have some too Jeff. So Kiva blocks. I don't know if you guys have seen these before basically, they're little wooden blocks and My son my third son, especially finn. This is kind of his big thing He's built giant creations. It's just like I printed off, actually put in here, a link to a Google doc of a bunch of that kind of found on the internet to kind of consolidate and just print out for him. But now he just goes to YouTube and finds different creations and builds things that are like towers tall and trains and these things with like marble, basically almost like a marble run, but it's a ping pong ball. It's really cool.

Jeff Corrigan: 9:18

That is cool. Got the little engineer going on.

Sheldon Mills: 9:22

You probably, you probably know by now, like, we tend to not go like little.

Jeff Corrigan: 9:29

Go big or go home.

Sheldon Mills: 9:30

Yeah, exactly. If you get into it, it's like, we'll either get a thousand or nothing.

Jeff Corrigan: 9:36

All in, baby. So, with that though, like, so, you guys know dominoes, so we won't probably dive into dominoes. And then like wooden train tracks, those are awesome, I mean, I know people build those like crazy. We've had a lot of geotracks in the past, they don't really do those anymore, but those were fun for us. If you want to train stuff, tell them about Camel, Camel, Camel though, because I think that's a big, big thing. Yeah.

Sheldon Mills: 9:57

I put a little snippet in here, but I actually wrote a little paragraph at the very end and the random thoughts. Camel, Camel, Camel. I've used this for a long time. It's a company that is this website that tracks the history and price of things on Amazon. And you can set price alerts so that there's a Chrome extension is what I use. So anytime I'm browsing on Amazon, I can just click the Camel, Camel, Camel extension and it will do this little dropdown and it shows me the price history of the Amazon third party used. And you can see. All the history, depending on the item, like how far it goes back. And you can see like the high, the low, trending, things like that. And then you can set alerts on there of what price you'd be willing to buy it at. So I use this most of the time when I'm on Amazon because not all the time, because a lot of things you're just like, I need this now shopping for it. You know, find a good price by always check the price. Right. Because it's just one of those things. It's like, I don't mind paying more for something as long as it's like a good deal. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I don't go for like the cheapest thing I go, but I want the best deal. Of whatever I decide is the right fit. Does that make sense?

Jeff Corrigan: 11:11

Yeah. No, exactly right. Like you're like, Hey, I'm going to buy this anyways, but I want to get it at the best price possible. Or I'm only willing to spend X amount of dollars on this thing. Yeah. And and I've done it with a couple of things ever since Sheldon showed me this. This is an extension you can throw onto Chrome. Like he said really cool though. Camel, camel, camel, go get their extension and you can just mark things that you want on there to, to post. And it'll just send you an email when the price drops. And, and, or goes below a certain amount that you've set as your upper limit.

Sheldon Mills: 11:41

It's really useful, especially if it's like, if you can think longterm, cause I think most of us, it's kind of hard not to be like, all right. birthdays in three weeks. Got to figure it out. I mean, but this is useful if you can kind of think longterm and you see things like we all see things sometimes it's either in the store or do you want to mean like, that's a common thing we'll do at a store. The kids want it. We'll be like, I'll take a picture for you and then we can go, go look. You know what I mean? Yeah. Is this price alerts? For things that I like, oh, this would be a cool toy, but it's kind of an expensive toy. Oh, I can see the price history. Like it's up to like 25 percent cheaper. You know what I mean? So it brings it down to like a palatable price. And so if you can wait, there's many a thing that like, okay, this is cool, but it's more of a splurge buy. We don't need it. But I set an alert and sometimes months later it'll pop back up. And it's kind of a good test for me to be if like months later, if it pops back up and I'm like, nah, do you know what I mean? Like that was like, but sometimes things will pop up and I'm like, Oh, awesome. Like if it's

Jeff Corrigan: 12:50

months later and you're still interested, right. Months later, you're still interested. All right. Maybe it's worth buying, you know, but that is a good, like force yourself to wait on things. And then you'll kind of get past the point because, you know, I've thought that actually works with like project ideas too, where I'm like, okay, you know, this is an interesting to me. And then if I still am thinking about it, five months later, then I'm like, all right, I probably need to do this thing. It's like, or at least try it out. Okay. So the one that I'm going to suggest here too is. Now, it's not your standard Hot Wheels. There is the Hot Wheels sets, and Sheldon and I have been talking about this a little bit, but Hot Wheels sets classically you build them once, you use them for a day, you take them down, and you never use them again. Or you like, you just use the track pieces for them to build your own tracks and stuff, right? They become more of like a free form tool. But, one of the things that they sell, and it's not their cheapest one, but I really like it, is this Hot Wheels Super Six Lane Raceway. But as we haven't been using it the traditional way, we've used it the traditional way, but then we, the way that we use it is much more fun. So we, we saw these guys online who are like, who do all these monster trucks and Hot Wheels stuff randomly. Yeah, your kids find the dumbest stuff on YouTube, but you'll notice, you know, if you have kids, you know this. If you don't have kids, you will know this. Or if you're young kids. They watch people play with toys online. That was never I don't know why that's a thing But it's it's a thing. It's a big thing anyway So they found these guys that were playing with monster trucks and they do a monster truck football using the super six lane And we had one and so we're like, hey, let's test this out So we use a table on one end and then super six lane on the other and we built our own Field and everything. And as we got into it, right, we changed the rules, made it even more awesome. And you have, we have like field goals and everything, right? Like blocked kicks, field goals, all of it. Right. We do it all and it's super fun. And we have big competitions every year for the holidays. And so now we bought a second super six lane and we bought like one of those playmats, like the, you know, this nine foot playmats that. It has the football field. It's all lined out and everything official football field. We get the little foam balls off of Amazon that are foam footballs. We rubber band , the football helmets from the NFL teams on the top of our characters, our monster truck characters. We go all out like it's it's become a real thing now and it's pretty challenging to score So we made it so it's like real football kind of and so anyway hot wheels super six lane We've used it for a million things, but our favorite thing is Monster truck football and that is a family game that we play on a regular basis.

Sheldon Mills: 15:26

That's cool. I was going to say we bought some Hot Wheels tracks, just regular ones, and it's kind of been a bit of a dud, if I'm honest, but We actually use just like free form tracks and the Hot Wheels themselves. It's like tradition now to always get like those for the younger kids. Like every year they get like a new Hot Wheel, right? So we have tons of Hot Wheels and they get played with a lot. It's just like the normal track itself as it hasn't been much of a hit.

Jeff Corrigan: 15:54

Yeah, we have endless, so many Hot Wheels, because my boys love racing and stuff, so it's been a, Hot Wheels are a big thing in our house, but like you said, we don't do a ton of the sets, we just have like, we just build our own tracks, and they'll use like, fold out tables, and wood planks, and all, everything to create their own stuff, and it's super fun, but.

Sheldon Mills: 16:19

I was going to say the the six lane raceway, if you've ever done Pinewood Derby, it's kind of like that. Yeah,

Jeff Corrigan: 16:26

it is. It's really like that. It's kind of fun because you can release them all at the same time. So we will, we'll regularly test the speed of all of our hot wheels to see which one's the actual fastest. You know, like an ongoing and it changes occasionally, you know, as they get older Some of the wheels get a little janky and there's a new one that comes along. It's the fastest now. Yeah,

Sheldon Mills: 16:50

so We've got classic toys and unique toys. I think maybe we should Skip to unique toys and come back to the classics. What do you think jeff?

Jeff Corrigan: 16:58

Exactly, right classic toys Let's just go through the list real quick. These are things that you obviously know But things that just continually get re brought up with us, right? So, should we just hit like the list real quick? Yeah, yeah, real quick. Now, these aren't classic like baseballs, that stuff we kind of left off the list because it seemed pretty obvious. But, like a swing set, a backyard swing set. We built, we got one, like, obviously I would recommend going, and I think Sheldon would agree, with the higher end ones, right? Lifetime, we got a Lifetime one a couple years ago, it's fantastic, our kids love it. It works great. It's

Sheldon Mills: 17:31

durable. I got the one that my parents installed 30 years ago and my dad ripped it out and like I just bought new hardware and seats and stuff. And yeah, so obviously it was galvanized pipe, you know what I mean? I could go to my grandchildren someday.

Jeff Corrigan: 17:48

Exactly. The higher quality swings that you buy, the longer it's going to last and those things, I mean they last forever. So I think those are, those are fun. Yo yos. This is a one that I know it seems like it's gone away many years ago, but there's a new, there's like the world champion yo yoer online named Gentry Steins out of California. And this guy is awesome. He has a whole YouTube channel that teaches you all the different tricks, super simple fun. And he has a little set of three yo yos that consistently go on sale that are perfect to learn all his different tricks. So I would just suggest going to check it out because I forever, I liked yo yos, but it was hard to get good when I was younger because there wasn't YouTube, listen to me If unless your dad or your buddy knew a trick, like you had no way of learning that trick, right? The website, there's no internet, so we just had to do what we had to do. But now you really can get pretty good and it only like within, we told ourselves we were gonna learn five tricks. We've learned dozens of tricks and it only took us like, you know, a month. And we've gotten, we've become like pretty good. Yo-yos, by by relative standards and it didn't take us very long and it's been really fun. Yo-yoing becomes a lot more fun when you can do lots of tricks. So yeah. Jump into the yo yo. It's fun.

Sheldon Mills: 19:00

I put one on here a soccer net, but what this really is, is whatever sport your kids are into. This is really, there, there's always, I guarantee there are creative solutions and alternatives to help your kid progress, learn, grow. And I picked this one, this, this certain company called Open Goal. What it is, is it's like a, There's your normal goal like soccer goals, but then it's like a wider net around it and it uses the system of like bungees so that you either score the goal or there's like, you know, five feet on each side and above. So if you miss, there's a bungee system and it springs the ball back. Right. So it's really kind of, it's kind of unique kind of difference. You know, it takes me like a good hour to set them up every year, but it stays up for like two to three months, every soccer season and for like three weeks straight. It's like the thing that all the neighborhood kids do is they'll come and they play this like around the world soccer cup in the backyard. And I just think it's kind of whatever your kids are into. If you'll take the time, like I guarantee you can find a way, kind of like Jeff was saying with the, yeah. With the Hot Wheels tracks to like make it your own, you know what I mean? To customize it and make it unique to you.

Jeff Corrigan: 20:13

Yeah, I think that's the funnest part is just making it work. You know, with the stuff you like. Yeah. Oh, we should do board. Sorry, we're going to, we got to do board games. Like, Sheldon is like the board game master, right? He knows every board game that ever existed. I'm very novice in the board game world, but I'm, you know, I've learned a little over the years. But he's made his own, just saying. Yeah, I've made several of my own now, so they're, they're card games mostly, but they're so. He's getting into it more and more. Yeah, it's, it's lots of fun. There's lots of fun things you can do. Doesn't matter what kind of gamer you are. So, tell us. If you were going to give us, you know, what, what's your shortlist here of things that you would

Sheldon Mills: 20:47

say? Yeah, well, I mean, it's funny when people talk about games now, I, I, I qualify it like what games do you like? What games have you played? Cause there's like enough genres and different things that you can, you can find something for everybody. Right. Yeah. I

Jeff Corrigan: 21:00

feel like hardcore

Sheldon Mills: 21:01

long. Yeah. Yeah. Strategic games. It's like four hours long. Like there's something for everybody. A few that I put on here. Maybe I'll just. quickly describe a couple of them are kind of like these light Euro games that are some, some are party games. Some are just like a little bit strategic, but they're on the light end of stuff. These are almost like, I call them like gateway games, like Catan, Settlers of Catan is a good gateway to Euro strategy that, you know, most people have played and most people know. So yeah,

Jeff Corrigan: 21:29

it's become super popular.

Sheldon Mills: 21:32

sHould we just go down the list real quick? Yeah, give us the, give us the list here. First one I put on here's one called Croconole, it's a dexterity game. It's like this, this big round board and you just flick these little discs and you're trying to get in the center hole and you're trying to hit your opponent off. It's really fun. And it's

Jeff Corrigan: 21:47

like two minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Like classic marvels.

Sheldon Mills: 21:52

jUst so you know, there's this website called the board game geek. That's kind of like the authority on board games. And you can go and find any board game. That's like ever existed and get everything from like rules, variants ratings and stuff like that, where to buy it and stuff like this is literally, if you're into board games, this is like the authority on board games. Yeah. That's awesome. There's another game. It's a good party game called just one. That's like a word game where you're trying to, to everybody use one word to describe what the person whose turn it is, but you can't have doubles and you can't have more than one word. And, and it's really fun. It's a good little party game. This is one that even young kids are pretty good at. If they can write, they can play this game and it's good for like, this is a good one for both adults and, and kids playing together is why I put it on there. Nice. I put a couple more on here. I'm not going to go through it right now, but if you want to check it out there's descriptions in our blog post. There's one called The Crew, Dixit, Codenames is kind of a classic that a lot of people know. Love Codenames. It's a good one. You can get Codenames Pictures again, which is a good one with younger kids if you need it. Wits and Wagers. Decrypto there's quite a few on here. Again, I put all these ones that are like lighter, partly party or really light strategy games. But if you want suggestions and about anything, again, I don't know enough to like, I'm not into enough to like create my own YouTube channel on board gaming, but almost. All right. So yeah.

Jeff Corrigan: 23:24

Wow, man. Keep jumping. Yeah, so I added a few and a similar idea where I felt like, hey, this should probably be stuff that's good with your kids, right? That's, that's the point of this episode and this blog. There's one, Sleeping Queens, if you haven't played that one, it's really fun, really easy to learn. Probably only takes 15 minutes to play a card game, super fun, and our kids love it. And we play it with our four year olds, so it's, you know, nothing difficult. Cover your cookies. Is also a good one. We love a lot of the grandpa Beck's games. If you haven't checked out grandpa Beck's games, I think you should. Like they have a lot of fun ones. There are usually really simple family fun games and there, but, but strategy enough that the adults like them, right? They're not boring to play. So like cover your cookies, cover your assets. Have you ever played cover your assets? Same, same, basically the same game, but with cookies and a few little minor shifts. There's one that my wife discovered last year. It apparently it's a really popular game in Africa. I shouldn't say Africa, Africa is a continent. I don't know which country in Africa, but from an African area is a game called Ubongo. And it's essentially. Tetris in game form. But it's really fun, so you get like the shapes and each of you has a little, you pull these boards and you have to match your shapes to the boards based on the cards and you collect gemstones for getting there first or for getting there in the top few. Anyways, it's really, it's a fun game and easy to learn and if you like anything like Tetris you will love this game. You won't go. Wizard, one of our all time favorite card games. Kind of like Phase 10. But with some twists and turns. I think it's way more fun than Phase 10, if you ask me. And then Skull King, very similar. Just like Wizard, but it's the Grandpa Beck's version and it's pirate themed. And it has a few other themes in it as well. Bang, if you haven't played Bang, right? Probably a lot of people have played Bang at this point. It's a pretty popular game. Bang is a little bit longer game and you really need kind of a significant size group to play it, but I think it's, it's really fun and my kids love it, like, my, my younger kids don't, but my older kids do. aNd like Sheldon said, one thing that I've gotten into just randomly out of the last couple years because my, I was helping my nephew with a school project cause I'm just one of those guys who likes to source things and Do projects. And so his mom's like, go talk to uncle Jeff. He might know how to get a game made because one of his projects at school was to make your own card game or board game. And so it calls me up and then I got really into it. Like Sheldon, I'm all in or I'm not in. Right. So I get all in. And basically I spent the last two years designing this game for. For my nephew, which he doesn't even know yet, so hopefully he's not listening to this, but I'm gonna, you know, I finally got it all made, I think I've, Sheldon helped me refine some of the minor rules there and playing it with his kids, so we're gonna make it and go. There's a place called The Game Crafters, which makes turning your own game into a printed, like, full fledged professional looking game really easy and fairly inexpensive. I mean, I think, you know, you can buy a game for 10 to 20 to 10 to 30. And I, I got mine made for, I mean, it was like custom made by me and they just did all the printing and everything, manufacturing of it. It was like 25. Right. So, I mean, that's for a one off that's, that's pretty decent price. If you ask me I'm sure you could get it cheaper too, if you did less cards, mine was pretty big deck, but anyway, too much detail, but yes, go to the game crafters, if you have at all interest in building your own game, it makes it super easy to get it all made. Where do we

Sheldon Mills: 26:46

want to go here? We haven't gotten to the unique tastes. Okay, another one on the classic is a trampoline. Okay, people love them or hate them. I love them. I think you have one too, Jeff. Actually, we don't have one at the moment. But there's a good reason for it. Partly because when we were thinking about getting one, our next door neighbor, who our kids are like, Best friends with got one. So it's almost like well, they're over there all the time And so probably when there's words out, we'll get one

Jeff Corrigan: 27:16

Yes, we got I mean, we've got a tramp. We've had it for several years We love it. We did the in ground tramp. It's just so much less hassle and we live in a super windy area. So people's trams are constantly blowing over their fences, breaking windows and things. So, we, we did the smart way from the start, but I did have to dig the pit like five times. That's a long story, but, uh, re-dig the pit a couple of times and it was. It's way more work. I would have just had someone do it if I were to do it again, but I did it myself. My neighbor did bring a backhoe over and scoop out the major piece of it, but then I kind of refined it all. Long story, but it was it was a lot of work. Let me tell you that much. That tramp is never moving again. I'll tell you that much. If I move, I'm buying a tramp and it's going to be put in by someone other than me.

Sheldon Mills: 28:03

All right. Unique toys. You probably should have started with this. Unique. Okay,

Jeff Corrigan: 28:06

guys. The moment you've all been waiting for. The unique toys you like okay, you guys told us about trampolines and Lego like come on Where's the unique stuff you told us? Okay. Yeah, but we've

Sheldon Mills: 28:17

got a good list here. Yeah, I'll start with one. That's they're called Squigz, that's cute S Q U I G Z This is one of these weird things that you wouldn't think wouldn't be that fun but I kid you not like They get played with all the time. They're basically little silicone suction cups. There's like one on each side or there's like double sided or four, or do you know what I mean? There's different ones. It's like an elbow bend or a straight, longer one and things like that. And they just suction cup together, but it's like in the tub, in the, it's like a popular thing with our kids when we're going on vacation, like a long drive. To put those in the car because they put them on the windows and they build things with them there's actually a new game that this is going to come out Let's see, my son's birthday is this Saturday. So, you're probably not going to hear this, Finn. There's a game that started they're called Pop Darts. They basically took this concept and turned it into almost like a dart throwing. It's almost like dart throwing, but it's these pop darts, they stick on a table or a window or whatever surface they're trying to aim for. And I, it's funny because it's one of those things, because me and my wife saw these and we're like, our kids have literally done this. Why didn't we think of this? You know what I mean? Right. Like we, we made this game up ourselves, but they're a little bigger and a little longer. So actually, you know, we're trying it out and buying the actual set to give to my son just to see if it's really that much different. But yeah, these are one of those weird, unique things that gets a surprising amount of traction.

Jeff Corrigan: 29:54

Yeah. I love those kinds of things. Right. Yeah. And you just like. I love, I haven't even checked out squigs. I need to check them out. Is it squigs or squigs? I don't know, squigs,

Sheldon Mills: 30:03

squigs, squigs.

Jeff Corrigan: 30:04

Oh, Sheldon, he's been saying it wrong. Yeah, probably, probably squigs. Anyway, it's, yeah, squigs are squigs, but it looks really interesting. I'm going to check that out, because I mean, that's what you always need. Long drives, you need something to distract those kids. Something that's not like playing the iPad or whatever. Watching videos all the time. Okay, the next one, maybe you've heard of these. They're promoted all over online and Amazon, but if you have kids, they probably popped up on your feed somewhere because, you know, they're tracking you. That's, everybody is being tracked. That's a, that's a post for another day. But Stair Slides. Okay, we bought these a couple of years ago for Christmas. Just have been an absolute hit, right? Admittedly, they're not. Strong enough for adults above a certain weight, but they are really awesome for any kid or even teenagers, right? As long as you're teenagers. And not above a certain weight, in other words, but, um, I see an

Sheldon Mills: 31:00

opportunity here, Jeff. We need to make a more industrial sized version of

Jeff Corrigan: 31:05

these, I think. Exactly. The adult stair slides, because I think adults would love them. I, I, I still ride on it occasionally. So it's just, you know, you just gotta make sure they're not too far apart and stuff like that, but anyway, work really well. For kids. They are, I mean, stairs are pretty steep. So the one thing that we, we were supposed to get, now, you know, maybe this is a little bit of a downer on them, but. Overall, we've loved it. We were supposed to get a landing pad for free with our purchase as part of their deal, but then they ran out and then they said later they discontinued them. So I'm like, so your freebie, which led us to, , we got the whole stair slide at the discount, but the freebie we never got. Still kind of, you know, stings a little. So I only mentioned that because I really liked the product and even though they, they did stiff us on their freebie, but that's okay. Um, they are a little more expensive on Amazon. You can get them from their official site. And I think throughout the holidays, they have discounts quite often. So if you're interested in those, they're, they're really cool. I would buy at least the number to get up the majority of your stairs. Cause it's obviously the further, the better, right? Zip on down. So rather than the landing pad, we just ended up buying a little pad off of Amazon. You can fold out a gymnastics pad, a little small one, and that's worked great. For, for the landing pad.

Sheldon Mills: 32:22

Okay I almost didn't put this on here, but I did because of how much our kids play with it. And that's the exercise equipment that I have in the basement. Everything from like the plyo box to the pull up bars I built they're called Stall bars. They're kind of like the old gymnastics. It's like a bunch of bars up the wall and those and and and You know the stretch bands and kettlebells and and I put a link and you can watch it Basically, I took a picture of a video of the kids playing floors lava because you know, we lost that on On Netflix as well, right? Yeah. And so they built like their own course that uses the basement swings and the rope swings and like all this stuff to do like a floors lava course in the basement. That's what I'm telling

Jeff Corrigan: 33:10

you. There's never a dull moment at the Mills home. You just, you go over there, their basement is just, the Playland, like It's like, so, in addition to that, right, like we do have like the ply box. Kids love that. We, we have like a cool wooden slide thing that my wife's dad built for our baby. That's really cool. Teaching 'em how to climb things early and, you know, get injured . But we, we also how to not get injured. Yeah. How to not get injured, right?'cause now he'll have the, all the abilities, but my wife. Wanted to start doing the aerial yoga. So we, we did like the hangers in the basement and the cool thing about the aerial yoga cloth is that you can take it down and put it up anytime. It's like two seconds, right? Once you have the little hook in the ceiling and just hang it from some of the trusses. And I feel like it's, it's, it's worked great. And the kids love it. And we'll just like bust it out in the wintertime when it's, when it's too cold to go outside during the days. And the kids make all kinds of games on those things. Like Sheldon said, there's. So many fun little things you can do with exercise equipment or, you know, dual use type of things.

Sheldon Mills: 34:16

I want to put a plug in for the basement swings. I also put in, I actually put a link in here for the, the swivel hooks that we use. Actually there's a little bit experimentation as some ones that. didn't work as well. So I, I found these ones and they work really well. But again, we've, the, the swings that we got, I put the link in for the ones that we got off Amazon. We've done homemade stuff as well like for my daughter's birthday, it was like a monkey thing. So it was like, it's literally just like a cotton rope. So it's like rope swings to, uh, they call them like the therapy, like the cuddle swings or whatever. It's more like the cloth kind of like aerial yoga stuff. Yeah. We've made a couple of homemade things of those. If I could put a, a, a use amount to the dollar cost of like everything we've ever bought our children, this is probably one of the best things ever. Yeah. Like, 30 on Amazon for this chair swing, it's probably gotten like hundreds of hours

Jeff Corrigan: 35:08

of use. That is awesome. See, that's the thing is like, what can get the most use out of it for the the kids are going to love it so much.

Sheldon Mills: 35:16

And it's not just, I mean, my kids are a little crazy. Like we do, we do a lot of stuff like but sometimes it's like. It's like they're decompression as well. You know what I mean? Then you can actually find them. They're called therapy swings, which are like the, you know, like the cloth ones. It's depending on autism, stuff like that. It's not just for crazy energy out, but I find them taking a nap, reading a book just in the swing.

Jeff Corrigan: 35:42

That's awesome. Check out your, your basement

Sheldon Mills: 35:45

swings, people. Yeah. Okay. I got another one in here. Slack lines. Slack lines. I, again, I probably tend to be a little more on the side of like, let your kids have experiences. I mean, limit their exposure to danger and getting hurt, obviously. But I think there's a reason my kids tend to not get hurt as much as all the neighbor kids slacklines. I love slacklines and commonly you put them between two trees. We don't have. Big enough trees in our yards. I actually built, put some earth anchors in and built my own little kind of like custom jig that I can adjust the height. But again, these get pulled out several times a year and the kids just, just love it. Trying to balance, trying to bounce on it. It's just a lot of fun.

Jeff Corrigan: 36:33

Yeah. You, you actually just reminded me of something that's not on the list, but we should put on the list later. Our goal with this list guys is to continue to build onto it every year. With more ideas, right? More and more ideas for you. But this one has been huge for any outdoor activity camping. What we do hammocks, right? We both like the hammocks and a lot of people use hammocks, but I am telling you, we went camping last year as a big family reunion, you know, probably 30 kids there and all the kids under the age of 15 spent. 70 percent of the time in their hammocks, playing whatever games, pushing each other, throwing like, it was just like, there was like a little cluster of trees that had hammocks and the kids were in that almost all the time and it's just so awesome. I don't

Sheldon Mills: 37:17

know how your basement hooks are set up, but ours are set up. We can actually put a hammock in between.

Jeff Corrigan: 37:24

Nice. Yeah. Okay. Next one? Oh, next one. Well, I don't know how much I can say. I don't know. 3D printers, people. This is Sheldon's world right now, but soon to be my world.

Sheldon Mills: 37:40

Okay, this is one of those, 3D printing is becoming more and more commonplace. They get better and better every year. They become You know, different materials and things like that. This is just a lot of fun. And my older three kids they're to the point where they can all find designs. Thingiverse is a common one out there. I put some links into The notes here, but my oldest son has actually got into designing, you know, and I, I would love to do that more, but haven't that much yet. But there's no shortage of there's so many things out there. It's like with a 3D printer, you can print an infinite number of, of. Toys, if you wanted to, I don't really like to do that much just because it's like toys is more stuff sometimes, but I, I use it to 3d print what I think is like useful stuff. I can literally see things in my room, like this, like hangers for rolls of tape and stuff like that for, for boards and stuff that, that I, it's just like useful stuff. Like if that is better designing, I know a lot of people it's like something broke. Well, they can't find the replacements. They literally like pull out the measurement and calipers and like design it and like print it out by a whole new, do you know what I mean? 3d printers are a ton of

Jeff Corrigan: 38:57

fun. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's potentially endless. Right. And the funny thing is my boys are super excited about buying a 3d printer. And so they've been saving up their money over the last, six months or so. It's the first thing that they've ever, you know, kids reach that age where they now start saving money for things like, Oh, I'm going to prep and buy this thing. And. So they've been prepping to buy their own 3d printer. So they're pretty excited about

Sheldon Mills: 39:19

taking me back to that. They came over to our house and I showed them a couple of 3d printed race cars. Yes. And we, we drove outside and you know, like 3d printed, I've got some, I haven't finished putting them together. They're 3d printed nerf guns. They're like high powered.

Jeff Corrigan: 39:37

And so they, they were inspired by Sheldon's creations and we're like, we're buying one. That's like, you're going to have to pay for it yourselves. And so they've been working at it. For a long time now, all summer long. The timing is

Sheldon Mills: 39:48

right. About a couple years ago, actually less than that, a year and a half ago, there's a company called Bambu Lab that kind of took it from, it's as close to like print and play as it exists right now. It's almost like a real printer. You know what I mean? Like it does all these things that used to be kind of tedious and you have to have patience and it can go out of, it's easy to go out of whack. But it's like self leveling beds and adhesion and all this stuff that it's like AI, and it's all just, it's really close to just like a print and play. So the one that Jeff got, I'm really excited about because it's like four times as fast as mine and it's just all automatic. So this is about as close to, it's a good time to get into 3d printing right now.

Jeff Corrigan: 40:32

Yeah, I think it's going to be really fun. We're excited to see how it goes. Okay, next on the list, paddleboards, kayaks. Yeah, this is just You like water activities,

Sheldon Mills: 40:41

right? Water activities. Again, a few years ago, we invested in a couple, a couple good paddleboards, like blow up paddle Paddle boards and a couple of those kids kayaks are just those hard plastic ones. And again, it's only gets pulled out because of the seasonality of things three, four times a year, but kids look forward to it every time.

Jeff Corrigan: 41:02

It's awesome. And, and the following one is. Right in line with it. Right?

Sheldon Mills: 41:08

Yeah. Yeah. So I put the links in here so you can actually see it. It's a gymnastic bounce pad. If you've ever been to those trampoline places, which my kids love, uh, they usually have like a few of these in there as well. And what it is, it's just this, this inflatable bounce pad. And we bought one. I got one a while back. It's a, it's a, you can get them different thicknesses. It's an eight inch thick, which is on the thicker side. And it's six feet. By 20 feet. I actually got it. This is probably saying how crazy I am. I actually got it. I almost got one size bigger, but I realized it wouldn't fit in our basement because it'd be too big to fit in our giant basement playroom. Yeah. So I, I bit small enough to do a six foot by 20 foot and in the winter, whenever, you know, it works awesome to just like, it's just so much fun. It's just this giant gymnastics bounce pad, but it doubles as an inflatable Island. Cause we'll take it with us when we go out to the pond or wherever. And without fail, two, three people will ask us, what is that? Right? Because it's just this giant floating island out there. We have an anchor for it and everything. And the kids go out there and by the end, there's usually like 20 kids from the whole lake on there. And it doubles as a slip and slide. It's just one of those things that was kind of expensive, but three years in it looks brand new. And it just. It's literally out right now in our playroom, and there's just lots of energy and learning how not to hurt yourself by falling.

Jeff Corrigan: 42:47

Right. You get bouncing all over the place. Those are fun. I mean, you go to like the, there's like the Halloween, which is like, what do they call that? The corn bellies or whatever. Yeah. Bounce. Oh yeah. It's like having that in your own house. Practically. Right. I'm gonna go play. Yeah. I'm gonna go play. I love it. The other one, I've never used this one, but you said smokeless fire pit, right? We have one of the propane fire pits. It's cool. I think it's good for like those quick night outs that you don't have to like start the fire and everything, but it's, it's also you smell the propane quite a bit and it doesn't roast quite as well as a natural fire. Yeah.

Sheldon Mills: 43:23

This, well, this kind of sounds like a funny one for like gifts for kids, but my kids love making fires out back and we have a fire pit and roasting hot dogs, marshmallows, just like a staple. But a couple of years ago we decided to get one of the, the smokeless and I put those in quotes, right? Because it still uses firewood and there's still smoke. The way it works is there's like a double wall and the air conduction kind of like it burns off a lot more of the smoke. Home smokeless fire pits. And we actually really love it for a couple of reasons. One is that you can take it anywhere. Like literally you can put it on the grass, take it with us to a neighbor's or a party. Every year we go down and get a permit to cut down our own Christmas tree. And it's become tradition to take that up with us now and do s'mores and roast hot dogs in the middle of the forest and the snow. yEah. And this is a weird thing as well. It actually. Because of the way it kind of circulates the air and the heat's kind of concentrated on the top. It actually cooks really evenly. So you can roast hot dogs and marshmallows. Like you can get the perfect mallow much more easily than like an open pit.

Jeff Corrigan: 44:34

Nice. So yeah, I'm going to have to try that out because it sounds amazing. We love fire pits and doing s'mores and all that stuff. So

Sheldon Mills: 44:41

if you check them, if you've gone to Costco, you've probably seen the mini version of these. Right. This is, ours is big enough to be like an actual pit. So will stove is probably one of the name brands, but you can find them at Costco. There's these mini, mini ones. It's like made to be on a desktop, like, like just to do

Jeff Corrigan: 44:58

s'mores. Roast your own marshmallows on your desktop. Yeah.

Sheldon Mills: 45:01

Yeah. Start a fire. Like,

Jeff Corrigan: 45:03

why do you have a fire inside?

Sheldon Mills: 45:06

On your back patio. You know what I mean? So it's like made to be like Marlowe roasting size. Personal

Jeff Corrigan: 45:13

Marshmallow Wrestling. That's awesome. Okay, next one. This is by far and away one of my new favorite activities, right? I shouldn't say new. It's been several years now, but and it's getting really popular these days, but Nine Square in the Air. If you have not played this, now's the time, right? If you, if you liked Four Square, this is way better. So, but it's like a modern take on Four Square. Now you play with nine people. You can still winnow it down and do like four people if you want, but. It's it's also above you, so it's more like a volleyball type of net. It's not a net, but it's like a big square, and it has that stands and it'll go like different heights. You can check it out with the links, but the cool thing about 9Square is, first of all, you play with a lot of people. And then you rotate in every single turn, right? So if you have a group of 15, 20 people and you all want to play the same game together, this is ideal because you're rotating in constantly. No one has to wait very long. It's really fun. You can play with kids or adults. You can play, you know, you can lower and higher it with the set that we got. It's made out of aluminum. So it's like, it's nice and it's lightweight and easy to put up. It takes you maybe three to five minutes to put up. I put five to eight in case, you know, it takes you longer, but it really takes about three to five minutes to put together and put up and you can use it in the water, you can use it indoors and you can use it outside. Like it's. Really cool. The, well, mine's not anodized, so you might not be able to use ours in the water, but they have one that's anodized for a hundred dollars more than you can do in the water. And yeah, the price tag, when you first look at it, it's like, Oh, that's kind of expensive, you might think, but we use it all the time. I, people borrow it for group activities all the time. It's perfect for youth activities. Gets a ton of use, right? So even though the price point kind of like the, the gymnastics bounce pad that, that Sheldon was talking about, it seems high initially, but for how much use you get out of it and how much fun it is, and you can bring it to every group party and it's easy to cart around. The first one I ever played was at a neighborhood party and the guy who brought it was in this giant bag and he had made his own and it was out of Pete, like the thick PVC pipe stuff took a while to set up and. I mean, carrying that thing around was so ridiculous. So, I was like, well, that's really cool. So we looked at making our own cause I didn't know they existed. Otherwise looked at making our own and it was still going to cost us probably three, 400 to make our own, even a PVC pipe, right? With all that you needed, it was like anywhere from about 250 to 400, depending on how you want to make it. And then if you want her to make an adjustable, that was even more challenging. And so I was, I was kind of bummed out until I found there's actually a company here locally in Utah that makes. These aluminum ones that are really lightweight, easy to put together. And so fun to play with and they can raise and lower to height. So if you have like a bunch of five year olds that are playing great, the lowest level is going to be perfect for them. Right. So anyway, nine square in the air. I love that game. It's been a real cool set for us and just. endless fun.

Sheldon Mills: 48:14

Awesome. Yeah. We love nine square. I looked into it a while back. We can never quite. We just got a lot of stuff.

Jeff Corrigan: 48:23

I get it. There's always, there's always, that's always the debate now is, is so much is price, but then also like, do we want to store this?

Sheldon Mills: 48:30

Exactly. Well, that brings us to our next category and that is experiences because this is what we're starting to transition to a lot more because we've got to the point where it's like, do we really need more stuff? Probably not, right? Right. So, this is, we've got a few things in here, but one of the, the ones that we've really started to do more is just instead of, you know, I mean, we obviously do Christmas stuff for Christmas and gifts and things like that, but we do less now and we're starting to do, okay, this is, this is the family vacation that we're going to work toward other than Christmas gifts and stuff. So that's been a big transition over the last couple years to move away from probably less stuff and more experiences because we've already got. Enough,

Jeff Corrigan: 49:18

more than enough stuff, right? Yeah. You gonna put all this stuff

Sheldon Mills: 49:22

and I love it. I mean, all the things that we described today, right? We own it, we bought it, and I'm glad that we have it. And at the same time, you know, experiences at home, experiences abroad,

Jeff Corrigan: 49:33

I wanna do both. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and this one, I think the first one is. It's kind of a hybrid because it does require stuff, but there's subscription build boxes that I think are just awesome for kids and honestly fun for adults if you're, you know, helping your kids with it. But you have a bunch of listed out here, Sheldon,

, Sheldon Mills: 49:53

I mean, the kind of the original and kind of the gold standard is called the KiwiCo and they have From design to artistic to, I think even food stuff now, right? You can get a subscription box to anything these days and whatever your child is into, I guarantee you can find a subscription box that tailors. To them, whether that's music, art, anything, right? A couple of the ones that we really like, again, I kind of hinted at this, is the Crunchlabs, which is Mark Rober's custom KiwiCo boxes. I'm pretty sure that KiwiCo actually fulfills it for them. He's just like, to the point where it's, it's, it's branded 100 percent his stuff. But he, I meant to write a post about this and I never did because it was one of those ones I wanted to do it justice You know how sometimes you build something up in your mind and then like, you never actually get to it because it was like too big Yeah.

Jeff Corrigan: 50:49

Yes, I do

Sheldon Mills: 50:51

There these keys crunch that boxes. He did a competition over the summer And my kids ended up winning it. And so they flew us out to San Francisco to film, like, the last episode. Kind of a dream come true. So we've got, like, the, you know, the photograph of Mark Rober at Crunch Labs. That was awesome. My kids love them. These build boxes, these Crunch Lab build boxes. And my parents it's getting They've done this a few years. It's like, rather than more stuff, they weren't sure what to do. Grandkids don't want to just like, you know what I mean? Try and guess. So mine has been, my parents just like gave us like a lump sum of money for the grandkids, right? So we've actually used that. Specifically for the subscription box and that way we can tell the kids like this is from grandma and grandpa and it comes one a month for an entire year and it is another thing, right? It is more stuff, but they're also learning these engineering principles that comes along with these videos that Mark Rober does about, you know, the physics principle, the engineering principle behind it. So they're learning a lot. And so, again, these are kind of experiences and stuff, but we love

Jeff Corrigan: 52:02

them. Yeah, and we've, we did those last year as well

Sheldon Mills: 52:05

for the kids. You did Crunch, Crunch Labs? Yeah. Oh, okay. And they loved

Jeff Corrigan: 52:09

them a ton, right? They've been a fantastic fit. And the only, I mean, that's the only thing is we did stop them now just because you're starting to collect so much stuff. We're like, all right, we don't know where to put all this stuff, but they've been awesome to teach the kids and have like a cool, fun toy that they built themselves, right? Along with, yeah. And it's they're pretty fun little builds, a lot of them. So, and just for you guys, if you don't know who Mark Rober is, you probably do, but if you don't, for his kids to meet, Mark Rober would be the equivalent of like a 25 year old girl meeting Taylor Swift. Right? It's like that big of a deal. It's that big of a deal, right? It's like, Ah, alright, the kids love him. He's, he's also just a fun Guy on YouTube. So cool. Follow. All right. We have a few more in here, but I think, you know, what, where do we want to go with this? Cause we got to probably wrap things

Sheldon Mills: 52:57

up. Wrap it up. Let's just mention him real quick. Another thing along the experience is memberships. We usually try and pick like one a year, not even every year that we do this, but we've, you know, some local rec centers or the aquarium. And so it's like something to get out of the house. Obviously we can't do a lot or even every year that we've done this, but we've done memberships at different places and that's always been fun.

Jeff Corrigan: 53:24

Yeah. My wife does Thanksgiving point and we've done aquarium in the past and lots of stuff like that. It's always fun that you get to go. On a regular basis and visit these places.

Sheldon Mills: 53:36

I actually put three links to other, other blogs in here of three articles of experienced gifts for kids. Right. And each one of them had amazing ideas. So many that I just like, well, rather than try and like make my own, not as cool version of it, I'll just give you the link to theirs. Nice.

Jeff Corrigan: 53:58

That's awesome. This is like your perfect, like, if you're ever like, Oh, what gift should I get for my kids? Well, come back to this vlog. Come back to this episode. And check it out, because there's lots of options.

Sheldon Mills: 54:13

This is almost a, along with CamelCamel on how to save money, this is another way to do it. There's a couple of sites called Timu and AliExpress. This is one of the, they're both like direct from China. Interfaces. Timu, a little more user friendly, almost like smaller. They literally, I think their slogan is shop like a millionaire. Like it's literally kind of addictive. Shop

Jeff Corrigan: 54:36

like a billionaire.

Sheldon Mills: 54:38

Okay. It's literally kind of addictive. They get out of there and like, it's almost like social media. It has a certain meaning to it, right? You got to be careful. I would say AliExpress is a little bit in between like Timu and Amazon. It's almost like the consumer version of Alibaba, if you're familiar with that, right? But I found that there's a lot of overlap, but they're not exactly the same. Like there's stuff on one that's not on the other. So you do. You do kind of need to check both. And the key here is that if you don't need something. Like if you need it overnight, obviously Amazon. But if you ever thought to yourself this was made in China, you can get it for half the price on Timu and Aliexpress. If you're willing to wait a couple of weeks. Yeah.

Jeff Corrigan: 55:23

It'll take you two, three weeks to get the delivery, but the pricing on it is. Essentially what you would pay if you were trying to manufacture it in China and maybe with a tiny bit of a markup, but it's yeah, so that's, that's where a lot of people who sell on Amazon, get their products is from these companies, from these companies that are posting on Timu and Ali express. So if you're okay waiting on some stuff there, it's a great option. So yeah, take advantage of that guys. Oh wait, last thing. Sheldon he's a crafty guy. He likes the arts and crafts. If he was on Dude Perfect, his favorite, his favorite segment would be Get Crafty. These are his list of arts and crafts that he's enjoyed over the years, unique arts and crafts.

Sheldon Mills: 56:04

This is exposing how many things I've rabbit holed down over the years.

Jeff Corrigan: 56:11

Very interesting. I mean, like, think of all the stuff you get to, you've learned over the years of doing this. I'm

Sheldon Mills: 56:16

thinking of a couple easy crafts and arts of things that have been hits with the kids, even at family reunions. One is diamond art. thAt's been kind of a hit. That seemed to be a repeat each year at the family reunion. My kids love to paint by sticker books. Things that are a little bit different is it's not that hard, but it takes a little bit of internet research, but we, we have a lot of molds for cement, so like cement molds, everything from like boxes for planters to there's so many like letters that the kids. It's really cool to make something out of cement because it's so durable, right? You can get like the gnome molds and things like that as well. But I, I'm not doing it justice here, but we've done this quite a bit over the years. Cement, I think is an interesting medium and I would love to experiment more with.

Jeff Corrigan: 57:07

That's awesome. So yeah, you can like make your own cement molds if you want to put stuff in your garden or whatnot.

Sheldon Mills: 57:15

Another couple of weird things that I've So one of my favorite things that I've been able to grab a hold down over the years is candle making. Yes. Surprisingly fun, surprisingly useful. Actually, people love a candle, especially if it's like made by you. And it's really fun to make them with kids. You do have

Jeff Corrigan: 57:30

to be careful. I mean,

Sheldon Mills: 57:31

hot wax. Maybe we should have like, we should have a night. You guys come over and we can make candles together. Oh, or soap. And all this stuff for soap making as

Jeff Corrigan: 57:40

well. I love it. Soap making, candle making, we can make some cement molds. They make great gifts. They do. That's true.

Sheldon Mills: 57:48

So if you want any more details on anything we've talked about, I mean, we've talked a lot, but no, honestly, this is like a mammoth post with links and details. So you can dig into any one of these on the blog post. Yeah,

Jeff Corrigan: 58:00

check the post. We'll send this episode with an email. So you have that all in one place. And then we also If you want to email us right like the one thing that we've been thinking about a lot with this at with this is we? Would love to start Answering more of the questions you already have right? I think a lot of a lot of what Sheldon I have done in the past is we've like Guess that some of the questions or ideas you might want help with, and if it's in our wheelhouse, obviously We're if it's if it's parenting if it's habits if it's like personal development if it's in those areas, right? we would love to Add those two episodes about it and and honestly, you know, I'm experts

Sheldon Mills: 58:42

have guests on

Jeff Corrigan: 58:42

the show Yeah, exactly fine experts have guests on the show to answer the questions you already have And deliver that next level value from this podcast. And I know, you know, we've been, we've been gone a little bit over the last month or so. And part of that has been because we've been rethinking how we want to approach and how we can bring value to you and to anybody who's listening to this. So, hopefully this gift guide is, is kind of the first step in, you know, delivering on that promise. buT we, we think you guys are awesome and we can't appreciate more that you join us here on a regular basis and listen to our episodes. No matter how long we drone on at any given topic. We love it and we so much for, for joining us on this journey. It's been fun. And Sheldon, what else are we going to say? Anything?

Sheldon Mills: 59:30

I hope you guys have the best Christmas ever. I see. Well, depending on when you're listening, it might not be Christmas, but this is recorded right before Christmas.

Jeff Corrigan: 59:38

Yes. So thank you guys for listening. Have a wonderful holiday and we'll catch you on the next episode. If you have questions, please email us. hello@habitmasters.Com.