Oh what a funny post to be writing. Three years ago, I decided to open a little shop. In my imagination, I’d neatly roll stock away into my store cupboards and pack orders while my kids napped / were at school / otherwise busy. But, in reality, it made my tiny house smaller, as new walls erected themselves out of stock boxes, and meant I stayed up too late to catch up on daily work.

I don’t know how much to share in this post. But closing the shop with just a ‘thank you and goodbye’ doesn’t feel like a proper farewell.

Little Goldie was a really great moment in my work-life. I didn’t think I’d be brave enough to start my own business – but I was! I didn’t think I’d be able to pull off making it work – and profitable – but I did! (Just.) The fact that I dared to start it has made me feel braver, even if it is time to go now.

I have business reasons for closing: it’s an incredibly competitive sector, where new shops selling the same products open constantly. My long-term plan was to design my own toys for Little Goldie, I had ideas and found someone who could make me prototypes, but the reality of continuing to be business-minded – and ploughing yet more money into the shop – made me anxious. So for now – but maybe not for ever – I am not going to do that.

I also have personal reasons for closing: I had a tiring pregnancy with my youngest, who was a high-needs baby. I have spent a year being exhausted, not helped by the fact that, like a crazy person, I packed orders while in labour, and then again two weeks after my c-section. Work slipped, stopped being a priority. Mistakes were made. You probably noticed that Little Goldie stagnated for around 18 months.

Now, I want less stress.

I am pretty happy to be saying goodbye to something that started out as freeing and ended up as binding, although I hope I haven’t gone too far down the negative path in this post. Those are the only negatives.

Here are the positives: I feel lucky to have been part of this industry. It’s warm and friendly and fun; full of designers with an immense collective creative power who are just as wonderful as their wares make them seem. And I have loved choosing the products – if such a job existed where I could do just that, I’d submit my pushy application at the soonest.

Little Goldie’s blog and Instagram will continue; I hope you’ll stick around but understand if you’re off now.

The blog will focus on the best eco-friendly, handmade, fairly-traded toys for children I can find (the things I started Little Goldie to sell). My Instagram will be a bit of that too, but mostly just me and my family.

The blog will be a hobby, just for fun, but also because I love the world of children’s design and the name Little Goldie too much to say goodbye to it for good.

Work-wise, I’m excited to be off following another little string left by another dream.

All that’s left to say now is… thank you for having me. Running this sweet store has been more fun than I’ve made it sound. And it was so lovely to meet you 🙂

I know what you’re thinking. What a surprise! A smug blog post in praise of wooden toys! But I don’t prefer wooden toys because I started Little Goldie. I started Little Goldie, in part, because I’m so keen on the benefits of wooden toys.

When Theo was born, we inherited – and were bought – a slew of plastic toys. I thought: That’s just what babies play with, right?

I didn’t consider it any further than that until I spoke to a friend of mine when Theo was about 6-months-old. She told me her rule: no plastic toys at all for her daughter.

No plastic toys? It didn’t even seem possible. Just because they’re ugly? My friend and I didn’t really talk about it then, but it stuck with me and I thought about it a lot. After considering it carefully, I try not to buy plastic toys, either – and here are my reasons.

Plastic toys are environmentally irresponsible
This is the first reason why I decided to stop buying new plastic toys. As if the mass-produced nature of plastic wasn’t enough, 99% of seabirds in the world will have plastic of some kind in their stomach by 2050. That’s the trouble with plastic; it’s not actually disposable. When we’re done with it, it doesn’t go away. It does real harm. We’ve got enough plastic in the world already, haven’t we?

Wood is a natural material
Wood – unlike plastic – is naturally anti-bacterial because bacteria can’t grow on it. This alone makes it the perfect material for a teether. Think about it: why do we give children hunks of plastic to gum on?! I did, but now I know there are alternatives.

I choose toys that are made of natural, sustainable wood, and – if coloured –  finished with water-based paints and natural oils. So, when my baby puts this stuff in his mouth – which he is programmed to do – I don’t have to worry about it.

BPA and phthalates sound pretty nasty
I used to wonder if this was all just a paranoid fad. But it isn’t and it’s real and we do need to be aware of what we’re giving our children.

On the whole, though, I’m not militant about it. I mean, my child doesn’t drink out of a glass beaker. But it is a thing and I do think about it. (Are there any non-plastic sippy cups out there, incidentally?! I really want to know!)

I want to encourage imaginative play
Open-ended toys are wonderful for encouraging children to create many different play-scenarios. Conversely, you buy a child an electronic toy with buttons (these are pretty much always plastic) and all the toy is used for is to press those buttons and do what they toy says.

But if you buy them an open-ended toy like, for example, a wooden wave stacking toy, they will use it for the obvious – pretend water in small-world play – but they are also likely to access their imagination and use them for something else. My toddler uses his wave stacking toy like little telephones. He picks one up, says “Hiya! See y’soon!”,  and hands it over to me to chat to whoever. So I don’t need to buy him a plastic toy phone.

The feel of wood is just… nicer
There is something gorgeously tactile about wood because it is a natural material. Whizzing around a wooden car on the floor just feels a bit nicer than a slippy plastic one, right?

I love the generational value of them, too. When you sort through your child’s old toys to put away and treasure, you naturally tend to set aside things that will store well and have a timeless feel. Wooden toys are so great for that.

On the downside… wooden toys are pricier
Yeah, they totally are. I’ve reconciled that with my motto: buy less, buy better. (This motto is hard to stick to, especially when it comes to clothes!)

Plastic toys are cheaper, which means we tend to buy more of them. It feels great to get our children something new and fun, though, doesn’t it? But they don’t need a new, crappy thing every week. Kids don’t have such a short attention span with toys, not if they are free to use their imagination with them. And I’m keen to teach mine not to become reckless consumers, but to – instead – make more thoughtful choices.

While the price of wooden toys may be higher, you can easily find lovely ones second-hand – wood has a great lifespan and sometimes it even gains character with time. My mother-in-law loves browsing the charity shops in North London to look for toys for her grandchildren. She has found the sweetest pile of second-hand (or – if you want to be pretentious – vintage) wooden toys that her grandkids love.

But finally…
It would be hard to avoid plastic altogether. I am just consciously moving over to buying more natural toys.

If the toy had great play-value, of course I would buy a plastic toy – something like Lego or Duplo or PlayMobil – but I might try and get them second-hand first (Lego, incidentally, are now committed to experimenting with a new eco-design).

I also like a company called Green Toys, who manufacture plastic toys made from recycled milk bottles and the quality is great. I have the bucket-and-spade set, and have my eye on the watering can.

One last thought: what was your favourite toy as a child? It probably wasn’t something flash-in-the-pan. A plastic, singing cat isn’t something you’ll remember or keep forever, is it? 😉

I grew up in a coastal village in the northeast of England thinking London was the most glamorous place on the planet.

I met a girl at university who was from London (turns out, she was actually from Croydon but I was totally clueless about the difference). She went around saying things like: “You can take the girl out of South London but you can’t take South London out of the girl!” She had other London friends and they all laughed together at that saying. I’d never heard it before. How cool! I wanted to say that sort of stuff.

And… SOUTH London. Wow, I thought. London has norths and souths? And maybe even easts and wests? I didn’t know that. There is no South Sunderland.

When I came here, finally, bursting with party-popper excitement as I wheeled my suitcase down Brick Lane in 2003, people were everywhere – the street looked like a holiday.

At my first job, a colleague told me: “When you get married, you’ll leave London. That’s what people do.”

My reply was: “Nope.”

I married a Londoner. “This is a great place to raise children,” we agreed.

The cultural opportunities – all those museums – the parks, the… well, selfishly, I just wanted to stay in the place that I yearned to live in my whole life. All the rest was just a persuasion.

The cultural opportunities here *are* wonderful though. Whoever you are: a scientist, an artist, a cook, a not-really-sure, you can find something for you here, just a bus-ride away.

And if you have a new baby in London, there are so many groups you can join. So many friends you can make – in fact, NCT-groups are sorted by people who have a due-date within two weeks of each other. In more remote parts of the country, NCT-groups are sorted by due-dates within two *months* of each other. If you don’t want to be, you won’t be lonely with a baby in London.

I live in Hackney, the schools here are actually fantastic. And if I wanted access to private schools, there is plenty of choice – Highgate, Walthamstow, Islington – only a drive away.

But lately I’ve been wondering. Is growing up in London only the lovely whirlwind of museums, parks, amazing food and culture if you’re well-off?

It’s not so easy living in the most expensive city in the world when you’re on a middle income with a family. Let’s face it: our house is pretty small and we can’t upgrade in our neighbourhood. We don’t have a garden.

And with all London’s bustle comes unwanted noise. There is a bloke who lives nearby who swears and shouts and hollers the night away. With our windows open, some nights my baby falls asleep to the sound of police helicopters, hipster parties and this man’s anger.

So, recently, when we went to North Devon, a little part of me yearned for that life for my kids.

Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, if my kids could grow up somewhere that they can ride their bikes in circles, safely, in the street? Where we can have a big, green expanse of a garden that they can play imaginative games in with their friends until it turns dark and their noses turn pink with cold?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful for them to have a childhood where they can skip along to their local village primary school, with the smell of salty seaside air taken completely for granted as we breathe it in and out, not even noticing how fresh it is?

It all sounds so blissful. But, if we left, I wonder if I’d find the smallness of a little village crushing. I love being surrounded by all kinds of people, not just one homogenised group. Because I am a city-person, I fear that, if I left, I would begin sentences with “When I lived in London…” and pause when strangers ask where I’m from. I just don’t know.

I don’t think there’s such thing as a right place to live – big cities and the countryside are both wonderful places to grow up if you’re lucky enough to have a family who will give you love, sunshine, parks and culture.

For me, I guess I’ve just persuaded myself to stay here – if I can.

Where do you think is the best place to raise kids? Did any of you leave the city to go to the countryside when you had kids?