ToyFun

Upon entering Swain’s Art Materials, you may be confused and a little frightened by the fact that there are way more toys than art supplies. If this happens, turn sixty five degrees clockwise and take five big steps forward; you’ll find yourself amongst artistically motivated shoppers momentarily.
If you are neither confused nor frightened – that is, if you find the idea row upon row of toys as exciting as I do* – welcome to ToyFun. An independent shop located inside Swain’s, it carries just about every educational/​learning-​based toy to have been released since the early nineties.
I kid you not. A recent trip unearthed colored chalk, gummy internal organs, dozens of giant and creepy stuffed animals, coloring books, slinkies of all shapes and sizes, a board game called «Math Baseball,» glitter-​filled jump ropes, hand and finger puppets out the wazoo, tone bells, kits for making pot holders*, dress-​up chests, a thing that melts candy into jewelry, a card game about morals, a silver triangle, an «I Can Juggle!» set, and about a thousand other things that I simply do not care to mention or else forgot completely.
The only downside is that, as with many products geared toward stupid, impressionable children, everything at ToyFun costs more than it would were it not for the fact that children are, in fact, stupid and impressionable. Everything is fun to look at, but at the end of the day, who wants to spend eleven dollars on a finger puppet that looks kind of like a turtle?
Not me, and hopefully not you. It is for this reason that I cannot give ToyFun more than three stars, though it is otherwise a four and a half star kind of place.
*I’m still not a freak or a pedophile; it turns out that I’m just really, really immature.
**These do NOT hold the good kind of pot. I checked.