What Author and Illustrator Jon Klassen’s Kids Can’t Live Without

This ’90s jam was put out by a company that sold a lot of similar stuff, but it stopped selling this toy at some point. Then, around last year, the inventor got his rights back and has started making it again. It’s a soft leather baseball with a long nylon tail in three colors; you swing it sort of like a grappling hook. Then you let it go, and you catch it by the tail, too.

There is a point system based on the color you catch, but no one really adheres to that. We found, especially for younger kids who might either be intimidated by real sports equipment or just not interested in it, that this has the visual attitude and tactile feeling of a toy as much as a piece of sports equipment so it has a lower barrier to entry. A lot of kids at the schoolyard or the park gravitate toward us when we’re playing with it because it doesn’t look like we’re up to something too difficult. It just looks fun. You don’t have to be very skilled to do it and get a really long throw, so it’s really satisfying.

We have the kind of kids who,when they sit down at a restaurant, immediately need pens and pencils in hand, and if you bring some big fancy sketchbook, it’s a pain in the butt. But index cards are loose. You can grab a stack and keep them in your tote bag or your pocket or whatever. The blank side can serve for what you draw, and the reverse side encourages some writing. That’s a whole different exercise than having an open white sketchbook, in my mind, and they get a kick out of it. They use those two sides very differently.

Also there’s something precious about a sketchbook. When your kid fills one up, you’re like,Well, I can never get rid of this until I die. But the cards have a way of kind of drifting out into the universe. You don’t really keep track of them. And there’s something nice about that, too, I think. I was always really intimidated by sketchbooks when I was little. I didn’t want to touch them. They were too pristine, and they had this authority:What am I going to possibly draw that would justify this beautiful sketchbook?But note cards, no one gives a crap about note cards and you loosen up. I’ve seen them loosen up, andIloosen up when I’m drawing with them. I say, “It’s just a note card. Let’s try something out.”

You can carry this pencil sharpener to a restaurant and it doesn’t need plugging in at the table or anything. There’s a lot of these around, but a lot of them are garbage. This is the one we found that is actually super-dependable and kind of bulletproof. I’ve often found withart suppliesthat the ones from a generic brand are the best. And you’re not worried about them — if it falls out of the car in the parking lot or something, you’re not gonna cry your eyes out. I tried some other ones for the sake of variety and none of them was even close.

I understand there are differing opinions on video games and kids and everything, but I imagine there’s a lot of similar-minded parents of my generation who have a lot of affectionate memories of growing up on those early systems. We were kids when these things kind of blossomed, and a lot of my storytelling and atmospheric memories come from playing those games. So I’m not as averse. I understand the culture has changed a lot where they become much deeper and sometimes a lot worse for kids. So how we treatZeldaand how we treat video games generally — but especiallyZelda —is as a social thing. I have two boys, and the three of us sit on the couch and talk to one another and play this game and tell one another where to go and strategize and just talk. We’re talking almost more than we do at any other time. We can go half an hour in the car and everyone’s just looking out the window. But inZelda, we’re constantly chattering.

It’s an open-world game, which means you’re free to run around anywhere on this giant map. It’s a vast place, and you’re in the business of scaring up food and resources and battling whoever it is you come across. There is a structure, but it’s very loose. One of the very first memories I have of my younger son telling me what to do in the game is when I was approaching this goblin and he’s like, “I wouldn’t waste my arrows on this guy. You’re gonna need them later.” And I was like, “You’re right. You’re totally right. This is just a dalliance over here and we should save our fuel.” That kind of strategic thinking is so much fun to listen to, and they’re so much more focused than I am. I’m usually working on three things in the back of my mind while playing any of this stuff, but they are undistracted and completely focused on the problem at hand. My hope is that they have as rich a memory of these games as I did about my old games, where it’s like you can almost smell the places.

I had bought this for myself for book touring because you can play it on planes without needing Wi-Fi. You can even play it on the tarmac because it’s not hooked up to anything. Then it eventually became a family property, and now it gets passed to the back seat as much as it’s in the front seat. The difference here is that these aftermarket consoles play all the exact games I had as a kid. You can go on eBay and find your old favorite games and it’s super-nostalgic. What’s happened to kids’ games on phones and tablets and stuff is that they’ve turned into a trash fire of ads and predatory game design, where it wants you to pay extra dollars for more lives, or there’s an ad break every level, or some horrible stuff like that. It’s really depressing, and it adds a lot of noise to their day. This gets back to what gaming was before all that.

The games themselves are much simpler, and you can give them your old favorite games. It’s a quieter, more fenced-off experience that I really value. The trouble is you pay $14 forBalloon Kidor whatever, and when it comes, it might not work. So you pay another $14 and hope that one works. They love the Mario games.Super Mario Landwas the first Mario game for the Game Boy and then there was a second Mario game and one calledWario Landthat’s also really, really good. Those are the three they’re playing the most now.

Editor’s note: The Analogue game console is currently sold out on the brand’s website, but you cansign up for restock notifications on the product page.

This was again one of my own discoveries. I found I was much more focused at work when playing a tape on a tape player than I was with Spotify or YouTube or something where you have the entire history of music at your fingertips, so what the hell are you gonna listen to? If I had an album on, I’d play that through, and there was a calmness to the lack of choices. So we wanted that for the boys. Both my wife and I were big music people, and we kind of mourned the passing of album culture — rather than singles and songs, we loved introducing them to whole albums we really loved. Now we buy them tapes, and they can choose to bring two or three on a family trip instead of bringing the entire history of everything. I think there’s a richness to that experience, and again they’re not being distracted every third song by an ad for, you know, a hair-loss drug or something.

Organically, both boys, but especially the younger one, have picked out the Chemical Brothers and De La Soul. The older one has picked out the Beastie Boys and I think the Cure, which are both pretty good representations of their personalities. And they get to know those songs in a way that’s very personal to them. It’s one thing for me to play it loud in the car, being like, “This song rules!” And it’s another thing to put on headphones and go through it yourself. I really love giving them that, even though I’m in the front seat and we can talk about it if they have questions. Their experience with the music is super-focused because they’re going through all the songs with that one band. I wanna give them time by themselves with this stuff as much as I wanna go through it with them, too. And we can kinda do both with this setup.

We buy a lot of LEGO sets, but this big LEGO man is so satisfying because it’s this giant shape that you’re used to being so small and then you open his hat and there’s a little regular-size LEGO man in there powering him. What I really hate about a lot of new LEGO sets is there are a lot of dedicated pieces that wouldn’t do anything in any other set. It seems incorrect. Whereas this thing is built mainly with basic pieces. I think it’s a beautiful piece of design.

I buy a lot of old ’90s LEGO sets on eBay. I’m still very nostalgic with those old sets. It gets a little expensive because there’s a lot of people like me, it turns out. So the things you remember getting for Christmas that were probably $25 then are more like $150 now. I bought one calledthe Forestmen’s Hideout, which is a Robin Hood sort of set with a camouflage cave that opens. It was released in 1988 and is my favorite set of all time.

These Nike socks are great because they’re cheap and you open the drawer in the morning with six piles and it’s like, “What color do you want today?” I steal them all the time. Picking a primary color first thing in the morning is such a joy. They’re perfect.

I think thecooler sceneneeds to cool its jets a little bit. So this is sort of a political statement, but it’s also a very objectively great cooler. Most of my cooler needs are like two Diet Cokes, some granola bars, and some sandwiches, just something for the afternoon. I’m not going to Desert Storm or something. I’m going to the park, and this cooler is the perfect size. Plus it looks so damn happy. You can normally get one from the neighborhood hardware stores that always have a summer row with like five different blow-up killer whales, two Swiss Army knives, a bunch of crappy water guns, and then these things, and you buy them for $25 and it’s the happiest you’ll ever be buying anything.

This is my favoriteoffice supplyever. I don’t know if the kids would admit to having an affection for it as much as I do, but we certainly get the most mileage out of it because when you have a 7- and a 9-year-old, tape is like water in the house. Everything requires Scotch tape all the time. And this thing is handy, both because it’s a very satisfying, durable object you can drop 50 times, which we do a day, but also it can’t go in a drawer. You can’t stash it away. Half our discussions at home are about who put something somewhere, but no one’s ever looking for the tape because this shoe-size tape dispenser can’t be put away. The design hasn’t changed in 30 years. It doesn’t need to. It never should change. You can hear the sand swishing around it when you pick it up, which is like one of those things you just remember your whole life. Nothing’s ever gonna happen to ours, so I’ll never need to rebuy it, but if anything did happen, I know exactly what I would buy again.

Even before I had kids, I was attracted to art supplies for kids. I think it’s for a lot of the same reasons as the note cards, where it’s like I get really intimidated by a $12 marker, I don’t wanna use it. But I love the $20 for 64 colors Crayola set from Target, and a lot of times those cheaper markers actually kinda leave a lot of weird accidents for you. More expensive art supplies are about control, right? You wanna be dependable on a steady line and steady color application or whatever. I don’t want that. I don’t know what to do with that. I want happy accidents. I know what I wanna draw, but inside that drawing, I want a lot of weird shit to happen that I don’t control. So the cheap stuff actually behooves that, and as a bonus you’re working with like a 25-cent marker rather than something that is the cost of lunch. I’ve always had cheap stuff around, and we share all the time. It’s fun to go shopping with my kids because we’ll buy something over in the kids’ section and I’ll be like, “This is cool. I wanna try this crazy thing.”