The kid's had hot air balloons on the brain lately. Penguins are birds, but they don't fly? "Well they can fly in a hot air balloon." Tomorrow we're going to Hong Kong. "On a hot air balloon." &c., &c.
Now if I can just remember the site which pointed me to the hot air balloon shaped like a giant brain... ["igniting imaginations and raising neurological awareness around the globe"]
Thanks to my mom, the kid's also gotten introduced to Russian nesting dolls. This Christmas it was a doctrinally dubious nativity matryoshka doll set [Baby Jesus was inside a shepherd]. Not as touch to explain as a Yakov Smirnoff matryoshka doll, but still. What a country, indeed.
At just $9.95, the Baseball Holy Bear, meanwhile, is an everyday value. [via deadspin]
My daughter isn't "into" hot-air balloons, but we saw one at our local "drive around and look at christmas lights in various shapes", and my daughter (who has a serious Wizard of Oz infatuation) wouldn't stop talking about this scene in the movie.
Oh, and my daughter likes the nesting dolls at my mom's place, but when we went to my mother-in-law's place, she had two - one which was too tight for my daughter to open, and one which had no dolls inside of it, which totally threw my daughter for a loop...
A year or so ago Oilily had a whole Russian Princess theme for their clothing line, including matryoshkas galore. I've seen them starting to turn up on ebay, and only ridiculously expensive now, instead of preposterously!