November. 8, 2007 - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (“CPSC”) has announced a recall of Curious George 12-inch plush dolls with plastic faces, manufactured by Marvel Toys, of New York, NY, in China.

According to CPSC:  “Surface paint on the toy’s plastic face and construction hat contain excessive levels of lead which violates the federal lead paint standard.”

Consumers are advised to remove the toys from children and contact Marvel Toys for a refund.

The recall affects about 175,000 toys.

For more information, check out the CPSC news release.

Amber Alert has come out with a portable Child ID Kit aimed at gathering all of your child’s pertinent information in the event that it ever needs to be shared with law enforcement officials. I’ll be honest, when I first heard about it, I wasn’t terribly interested. I’m not one for wanting to think about the terrible things that can happen in the world, especially when it comes to my children. I’d rather bury my head in the sand and believe with all my heart that nothing bad will ever happen where my children are concerned.

After a little thought, though, I decided that this product is absolute genius. In the event of an emergency, I’m probably not going to be able to ramble off all of my children’s vital statistics (height, weight, distinguishing marks, etc) with great accuracy. I’m certainly not going to want to waste valuable time going home to gather the most recent pictures I can find or to dig through my address book for the phone numbers / addresses of the people they come in contact with most often.

Amber Alert’s Child ID Kit takes care of all of this and keeps all of the information you’ll need right at your fingertips. It took about 20 minutes to enter the information for all 3 of my children into the portable USB flash drive. It’s all date/time stamped so we know exactly when it was last updated and every bit of information we need is right there, password protected and ready if we ever need it - which we hopefully never will.

Like I said, I’d rather not think of the terrible things that can happen in the world and I’d rather not believe that any of it could ever touch my family but if it ever does, I’m ready.

A new recall and a new country to add the list of questionable toys. Mattel / Fisher-Price announced a recall today of 155,000 toys manufactured in Mexico over safety concerns. Click here for the full article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071106/hl_nm/mattel_recall_dc.

The focus of the recall is Fisher-Price’s Laugh and Learn 2-in-1 Learning Kitchen and was prompted over questionable lead levels.