Good clean fun for trips to the beach or pool. This 4-3/4” rubber shark has a small human foot sticking out of its maw. Give him a good squeeze and the leg pops out up to the shin. Quickly repeated squeezes make it look like the shark is having lunch.

Here's a little music box to crank. These are really cute, with a very nice sound, and they're in clear acrylic cases so you, or impressionable youngsters, can watch them work. They measure 2-1/4"x 2" x 1-1/4" with a 7/8" crank. We'll pick one that plays When You Wish upon a Star, Row, Row, Row your Boat, Brahms' Lullaby, or Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We won't pick the one that plays the score from Die Walküre because the wheel is just enormous.

Glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton, about 1 ft. tall. That is the end result. What you get is a box of bones that you snap together to create the final product. Which is kind of fun. Or of course you can leave some or all of them disassembled to create a sense of havoc. We're not going to claim it is anatomically correct, or educational. But you do need to figure out that feet don't grow from shoulders and thigh bones do not connect to jaw bones. Maybe 5 minutes of fun!! And the finished product is one of our better little Halloween guys.

Bored with looking at bicycles on the back of your playing cards? Sick of that one-eyed jack and the king with the ax? Add a little fun to your gin rummy with these full-tilt theme cards. Regular 52 decks, plus jokers, poker size, but with some of your favorites on both the backs and faces. You pick: Bigfoot; Marilyn Monroe in all her movies; Harry Potter and friends; Marvel superheroes; Bacon recipes galore; or a whole kennel of Dachshunds.

If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

More goose-sized than chicken-sized at 3-3/4" tall x 2-3/4" max dia, this soft, translucent-rubber egg glows with color. It can be set to stay one hue, or to change very slowly from purple through blue, green, orange and red to purple…. Very Zen. Or very cute in an Easter basket. Runs on (3) replaceable button-cell batteries, included.

Time was, these service bells were on every teacher's desk and the front desk of every hotel in the world. They're still a classically beautiful design, and they'll still bring folks running when you tap the little plunger on top. The shiny matte chrome bell sits on a fire-engine red enameled steel base and the whole thing is 3-1/8" dia x 2-1/4" tall.

They'll call you rainbow fingers when you have this pack of (4) LEDs attached to elastic rings with 3" long fiber optic bundles on the front. You get (1) LED/bundle for each finger--red, white,blue and green--and the fiber optics are removable. CJ, our Senior VP for Jazz Instrumentation, says you just might be able to use these as brushes on a snare drum with enough amplification, and the audience would love it. Irreplaceable batteries included. Order (2) sets, because you have (8) fingers.

Start with our selection of punches from Paper Shapers®. We'll pick (5) different paper punches, with cutouts approx 3/8" to 1/2" across, from a staggering variety of shapes, including hammers, leaves, birds, state outlines, animals, fish, tools, geometric shapes and many others. The punches themselves are 2-1/2" x 1-1/4" ovals with a thumb press.

Newtonian demonstrator for science teachers. Mindless play for the rest of us. These are shiny, nicely balanced, high-performance examples of the classic Newton's Cradle - a ball on one end of a row of (5) suspended, barely touching balls swings into the others, and the ball at the opposite end reacts to the collision. The 11/16" dia balls in the small version (all-metal frame 6-1/2" high x 4" x 4-1/4") will collide about 30 times. The 7/8" dia balls in the large version (metal frame 5-1/4" high x 4" x 6", with a wooden base) will collide about 100 times. Awesome. Even more awesome that we paid someone to count the bounces just for you! (Unpacking note: Less awesome if you just yank it out by the suspension lines and pull a couple of balls loose. Be gentle.)

Shoot one of these little plastic arrow-helicopter-rotor gismos straight up with the included rubber band launcher and watch it soar as far as 300 feet! A fun outdoor toy that grows in sophistication as you learn how to adjust the arrowcopter for wind conditions and flight patterns: distance, return, circular descent etc. Our "each" contains a package of two (2). Recommended for kids over the age of 9.

In another triumph of good taste, let us introduce our first squirting toilet bowl trick. Measures 3-1/2" tall x 3-3/4" deep and shoots over (5) feet when some unsuspecting person lifts the little lid. Perfect for mom's birthday. And no batteries required!

Hold the bottom onion-shaped bulb of this 4" glass toy in your hand and watch the liquid (green, red, blue or purple, we'll pick) magically bubble up into the top chamber and keep on bubbling like the dickens, as your grandmother used to say. The magic is ethyl alcohol and physics. WARNING! The glass if fragile and the liquid is nasty. If you drop the thing in the kitchen it will eat the finish off the tile and permanently stain the floor, so don't let the kids handle this item unsupervised.

Definitely not that other big green monster that ate the Pacific rim because he's been trademarked. This is just a 6" tall molded plastic green monster that happens to look just like him. (If coincidences didn't happen, there wouldn't be a name for them.) Oddzilla has movable arms, legs and tail.

It could have been called an Alabama Buzzer after Alabama Vest, the man who invented it. Or a Clegghorn, after Thaddeus Von Clegg, the clock master who fabricated the first one. But the hand-crafted 4-3/4" long steel instrument was a simple amusement, and the 1840s were a simple time. So it's simply a kazoo.

"WE DARE YOU!" by Vicki Cobb is a 322-page book for children, filled with over (300) scientific challenges and experiments that can be done with ordinary household stuff. A savvy adult could introduce kids to science by betting them their allowance money on the afore-mentioned challenges, including making square eggs without using a square chicken, writing with potatoes, blowing frozen soap bubbles, and a whole bunch more.

Well, if you had a crystal ball, you'd be able to see that there's a crystal ball in your future, and you'd know not to pass up this very, very nice glass gazing ball. It's 4-1/4" dia (and heavy) and comes with a footed dark-wood stand that spins smoothly. The stand is just over 3" dia. Together, the ball and stand are 6-1/4" tall. Comes in a presentation and storage box. The perfect accessory for your next fortune-telling gig.

Most of them are, of course, but the really cute ones turn out to be solar. You can spot solar owls because they wear yellow pants with red polka dots, which nocturnal owls don’t have the nerve for. This owl is just 3-5/8” tall, but will swing it’s head darn near 180 degrees for as long as the sun shines.