NettoCollection Blog

Choochee: A Story of an Eskimo Boy

A very special children's book--a story of friendship and rescue, brought to life with simple, arresting drawings--continues to work its magic.

Art Trip

Taking your kids to a museum should be fun, even if it's to a “grown-up” one.  The key is to start taking them at an early age – before the sentence “This is boring” or the words “Gift Shop!”  have entered their vocabulary.

Modern and contemporary art is great for infants and small children.   You can mesmerize a 7 month old with any big gestures of color, think Rothko’s Red and Orange at the MoMA.  And baby eyes love Takashi Murakami’s trippy mushrooms and strange forms.   Plus, infants like the people-watching just as much as you do.

Recently my 18 month old could not resist the Bill Viola video piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, all moody light, trees, and sky.  And for Kate, who is almost six, the best thing to do is bring some paper and pencils.  Her recent rendering of Picasso’s Tete de Femme sculpture was pretty cool.

See Takashi Murakami at MOCA, Los Angeles thru February 11th, 2008. If you’re far from the big city and still want a kid friendly tour check these out:

MOMA Destination Modern Art

Cézanne’s Astonishing Apples

Or search images by abstract or animal at:

SFMOMA Collections

By Liz

Good Causes: TCF

Here is an organization that is doing real good in a tough environment:

My sisters and I spent a long time developing a charitable giving plan after we sold our family business.  We wanted to support a cause that could make a tangible difference in an area neglected by mainstream charities.  The three of us believed very strongly in the need for education and women’s rights in the developing world, especially in Muslim countries.  We were introduced to The Citizen’s Foundation (TCF) by a friend of ours from Pakistan.

TCF is devoted to building and running primary and secondary schools in poor urban and rural areas of Pakistan.  Started by concerned citizens in 1995, they are non-governmental and extremely well run.  So far, they have opened about 450 schools all around Pakistan, all purpose built with libraries, art rooms, play areas… All faculty members are women, usually transported each day from the nearest (often not so near) big city.  The student body is about 50% girls, which is remarkable for that part of the world.  To make sure the parents of students are committed to educating their kids, each parent must pay tuition, even if it is only a dime.

I am proud to say my family is sponsoring the building of three schools in rural Pakistan.  I will post some pix of the schools shortly when they are open.  Take a look at their web site: The Citizen's Foundation.  It is quite encouraging to see some of the stuff going on in a part of the world from which we usually get only bad news.

By Claude

Puppy Love

Okay, so you’ve decided your baby won’t watch television until at least the age of five.  You’re convinced Baby Einstein videos won’t make her a genius either.  You see those wide innocent eyes staring at the screen and you feel, well, guilty.  Here is something to make you feel better or worse depending on how you look at it.

Go to Youtube.com and type in three words: cute baby animals.  Now with the click of a mouse you’ve got at least 25 homemade videos - baby tigers at the zoo, a litter of seven fluffy puppies running around someone’s suburban Japanese kitchen, a string of slow fade photos of kittens frolicking in the grass to a warbling Judy Collins.  You might cringe but your baby will love them and learn all the animal names too.  Also, they are only one to five minutes long so forget feeling guilty. 

The drawback – just try to send an email now with your little one in the room.  She’ll begin to pull at your leg and cry, “Amull! Amull! Animal!”

One of Madelyn’s favorites: tiny dogs in costumes, kitties in wicker baskets (the horror!) all set to Coldplay’s Yellow.  Beat that.

By Liz

Minimal Assembly Required

Everyone hates furniture assembly.  With suppliers trying to maximize product counts in the 40 foot shipping containers that circle the globe, there’s little to be found in the way of fully assembled furniture these days.  And so we roll up our sleeves and break out our screwdrivers.  Hopefully the result is a complete piece of furniture and the satisfaction of assembling it oneself.

For those who find that satisfaction elusive no matter how hard they try, let me introduce you to Guillow’s Jetfire planes.  Here is an object that one can master and enjoy in less than two minutes for less than $2.  Tear open the bag, insert four parts into the fuselage, and fly.  No instructions necessary, no diagrams, no tools, no hardware. 

Ready to take things to the next level?   Slide the wing forward for loops and circles, or slide the wing back for long flights. Fly it in your backyard with a child and aim to land it in a hula hoop on the far side of the lawn. Mission accomplished.

By Alex

Travel

While we think a NettoCollection crib is the one and only for your little tyke, at some point in your travels across the world or across town you will find yourself with a very tired baby and no crib in sight. 

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting offers several makeshift solutions from using a storage bin to a dresser drawer (Hint:  First remove drawer from dresser and place on ground) to get you through a cribless night.  A solution they don’t mention but that I used when my daughter was very small, is a large hard-sided suitcase.  Obviously these improvised cribs and the precious contents within are to be monitored at all times.  Still, it beats always staying at home.

By Liz
The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Parenting by Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht, Sarah Jordan at Amazon

David Netto Book Recommendations

Here are some children’s books that are very special to me, because they’re smart, goofy, well-drawn or all of the above. I think you will enjoy them too. Let me know by email if there’s anything you’d like to see on here I should know about.

Baby Whale's Journey, by Jonathan London, illustrated by Jon Van Zyle (Chronicle Books)

D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri D'Aulaire and Edgar Parin D'Aulaire (Doubleday)

Dog Food, by Saxton Freymann (Arthur A. Levine Books)

Eloise in Paris, by Kay Thompson, illustrated by Hilary Knight (Simon & Schuster)

Georgie's Halloween, by Robert Bright (Doubleday)

North Pole/South Pole, by Jacques Duquennoy (Raincoast Books)

Olivia Counts, by Ian Falconer (Atheneum Books)

By David
Originally published on CHILD.com

Image courtesy of Chronicle Books

In the Details

A friend recently visited the Schroeder House by Gerrit Reitveld in Utrecht, The Netherlands.  To her surprise, Reitveld’s beacon of modernism was full of human touches like visible paint bristle lines and less than perfect square corners when seen up close.  It was a pleasant reminder that modern does not have to mean machine made or high tech- it can just as easily imply organic or hand crafted.

I have visited our factory in Poland eight times, and on each visit I am impressed with the history of old world craftsmanship and quality the workers maintain.  When our first shipment of furniture arrived in 2003, Loft crib legs were identified by their part names with a handwritten “E1” or “E2-” to make assembly easier.  I liked the handwritten reminder (on a concealed surface) of a factory worker against the sleek white lacquered surfaces of the crib. 

Our Loft crib legs are now stamped with a machine template that looks great, too- but when I found a spare leg from that first shipment I saved it as a souvenir of a certain worker’s touch.

By Alex

Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros

It's a geography lesson for 3-year-olds, but it's also a cartoon. A movie starring Donald Duck, but no grown-up of any age can look away. A musical from the golden age of musicals, with numbers as elaborate as anything from MGM, but nobody's in it you've ever heard of (except of course Donald Duck), and the score is all hot and south-of-the-border style. A Latin musical.

Give up? I'm talking about Walt Disney's The Three Caballeros, one of the most remarkable movies for children ever made. Disney's seventh animated feature film, from 1944, is not as well known as the early biggies like Pinocchio and Snow White but it's just as great and in a genre all its own.

It's a tour of Latin American countries by three avian cartoon characters, with ravishing illustrative art and knockout musical numbers to get across something of the culture of Patagonia, Mexico, and most memorably, Brazil. I had never seen it as a child but discovered it when my daughter Kate fell in love with the movie and asked to watch it more than any of her prior obsessions. So I sat down and watched it with her and couldn't believe my eyes.

Full Circle

I wanted to share this picture of our booth at the Kind + Jugend show in Cologne, Germany with you. 

At the show we were so thrilled at the strong interest in our designs from companies based in Scandinavia, Germany, and England. It felt like we'd come full circle in a way, offering European design infused with American sensibility to the countries whose clean, modern but classic aesthetics inspired our designs. We will continue in Europe the mission we pioneered four years ago at home: to make stylish baby furniture--of the highest quality--that need never be outgrown.