Edgar & Ellen treats at Target

Here's candy with a twinkle in its eye in a Colorado Target store. Edgar & Ellen mad lab beakers, test tubes, dissectible gummi frogs, even hairy-eyeball candy buckets honoring Edgar & Ellen's pet, "Pet" make Halloween a little more humorous.

Edgar & Ellen began as a book series--but come October 7th, it will also be a TV series on Nicktoons Network.

The shape of Crocs to come

The best place to see the Crocs of the future is in the Denver airport. Probably because Colorado invented Crocs.

All children wear them (pink and lavender on little girls, lime and purple on older ones) and there's a balcony dedicated to selling the new styles. Families exclaimed over colorful rubber boots, lined slippers and a rubber version of Mary Janes. Popular decorations included Dora the Explorer and the American Flag.

Today in Chicago, I counted 6 pairs of the traditional Crocs on kids headed to school, and one tiny green pastel pair on a toddler. If you're looking for premium idea, think of new ways to fill the perforations-- kids' eyes are closer to their shoes than adults's eyes are.

David Whitten's 27 kids

Last time I saw my old schoolmate, David, he and Cheryl had only 21 kids. When he wrote me this week, he mentioned that he now has 6 more. All of their lovely, boisterous children (many of whom were born with difficult conditions including blindness, missing limbs or deforming maladies) have been adopted. The driveway echoes with with bouncing of basketballs and the house vibrates with energy.

Some of his kids once told me they wanted a karaoke machine for Christmas. i sent one, and David reported that the whole crew embraced it and turned the living room into a non-stop club. The universal truth is that kids love to sing.

Now David says that Ben, his Korean son, has acquired another little Korean brother. Their favorite song? "I'm a Seoul man!"