Tag Archives: Allied Arts / Stanford Park

My neighborhood is either the Disneyland of Halloween or the Ivy League of Halloween for our area (our streets are called Yale, Princeton, Harvard, etc.!). I strongly prefer the latter. I should explain.

We have a reputation for being so fun on Halloween that lots and lots of trick-or-treaters come by who would never pass by our house the rest of the year. We handed out a few hundred treats last night, and we would have handed out a few hundred more if we hadn’t shut down at 8pm.

You “Halloween Tourists” know who you are. Well, I have a message for you: Continue reading →

226 Yale Rd., Menlo Park, CA
Saturday, May 1
RSVP to {encode=”mike@playborhood.com” title=”Mike Lanza”} for the Play Day and/or Parent Seminar

Play Day

3pm – 6pm

Bring your kids to play with us in our Playborhood! See how we’ve transformed our front and back yards into venues for everyday play. Fun activities include the following:

1. draw on front yard white board
2. play with vintage (circa late 1960s) hot wheels track and cars
3. build huge structures with Slotwood, which is like life-sized Lincoln Logs
4. play in sandbox
5. play in fountain (also see this video)
6. jump on in-ground trampoline
7. do the following with our huge playhouse:
   • climb up it (see this and this)
   • slide down its slides (front and back of the playhouse)
   • draw on its whiteboard walls inside
   • hang out on the 2nd floor
8. play chase games with our big beach balls in the back yard (see this and this)
9. swing on the swing set (see this and this and this)

Parent Seminar

Neighborhood Play, Every Day
4pm – 5pm

Playborhood.com’s Mike Lanza will share his secrets with parents on how to give your kids a life of neighborhood play, everyday. He will show you how to:

1. Simplify your kids’ lives
2. Move to a play-friendly block
3. Make a neighborhood hangout that draws kids to play outside every day
4. Embrace technologies that get kids socializing face-to-face and playing outside
5. Facilitate Self-Reliance, don’t control your kids

Continue reading →

226 Yale Rd., Menlo Park, CA
Sunday, September 27
RSVP to Mike Lanza for the Play Day and/or Parent Seminar

Play Day

3pm – 5:30pm

Bring your kids to play with us in our Playborhood! See how we’ve transformed our front and back yards into venues for everyday play. Fun activities include the following:

1. draw on front yard white board
2. play with vintage (circa late 1960s) hot wheels track and cars
3. build huge structures with Slotwood, which is like life-sized Lincoln Logs
4. play in sandbox
5. play in fountain (also see this video)
6. play street hockey
7. do the following with our huge playhouse:
   • climb up it (see this and this)
   • slide down its slides (front and back of the playhouse)
   • draw on its whiteboard walls inside
   • hang out on the 2nd floor
8. play chase games with our big beach balls in the back yard (see this and this)
9. swing on the swing set (see this and this and this)

Parent Seminar

Making Your Neighborhood Into a Playborhood
4pm – 5pm

Playborhood.com’s Mike Lanza will share his secrets with parents on how to make your neighborhood into a Playborhood. He will show you how to:

1. Move to a play-friendly block
2. Make a Place that draws kids to play outside every day
3. Embrace digital technologies that get kids socializing and playing outside
4. Show Up in your neighborhood to help make it a safe, nurturing, and fun place for your kids

Continue reading →

It’s three houses down and across the street from my infamous front yard and our surrounding Playborhood. 3 BR, 2 BA, $1.6m. {encode=”mike@playborhood.com” title=”Contact me”} for more info on the ‘hood. For info on the house, see for yourself. Continue reading →

This fall, my son Marco will start kindergarten at our neighborhood public elementary school, Oak Knoll. So will our next-door neighbor Jonathan. So will the girl who lives behind us, Bailey. So will the kid around the corner, Eli. So will the kid one block away, Spencer. So will my good friend’s kid, Emma, who lives three blocks away.

Marco will ride his bike to school most days along with many of those kids. I fully anticipate that our kids will have a wonderful time playing outside here every day after riding back from school. All the groundwork we’ve laid in making outdoor play a habit here plus all the attractions we’re adding to our front and back yards (I’ll write more about these in future articles) will help assure that, but there’s no denying that going to the same school and biking to and from there will be great bonding experiences for these kids.

On the other hand, the kid a block down the street, Andrew, will start kindergarten this fall at a private school. I’m guessing he won’t have much of a relationship with any of those Oak Knoll kids. He hardly plays with the neighborhood kids now. Once kindergarten starts, he’ll get busier, so he probably won’t play with them then, either. His friends will be almost exclusively from his school and not from our neighborhood. Continue reading →

My family’s lived for nine months now in a home we spent 2-1/2 years searching for. We were determined to live on a block that had great Playborhood potential, and I was pretty sure we’d found it.

So, how’s it going? In brief, my verdict is that we’re right on the verge of becoming a bona-fide Playborhood now. I consider a Playborhood to be a place where children, ideally from more than one family, play outside on their own on a regular basis – i.e. at least a couple days a week.

At least three or four nights a week after dinner, I play with my two boys – Marco (4-1/2) and Nico (1-1/2) – in the street. We usually play street hockey, but we’ve also played basketball and t-ball. If it were only us out there, we would be no closer to being a Playborhood than when we moved in and I saw kids playing outside very rarely.

However, other families are starting to join in, too. And, most importantly, Marco and other toddlers are starting to take some independent initiative. Three nights ago was an excellent example of this. Continue reading →

A nice new house is for sale on my block. It’s at 324 Yale Road in Menlo Park, which is eight houses away from mine. Recall that I spent 2-1/2 years looking for this house and chose it because it had great Playborhood potential for children in the preschool years. Later, I wrote about how calm the streets are here and how great Halloween is here (i.e. we have a high “Trick-or-Treater Index). Last, but not least, recall that I’m building an outdoor family room in my front yard, so by spring there should be a very cool neighborhood hangout a few houses away.

I must admit that there are more kids right around my house than at this new house, but right next door, there are two great preschool boys. At any rate, the kid population on the block is quite good.

So, what do I think of the house? It’s new, and I personally love new houses. It has a great basement plus two floors, so the layout is fairly vertical. It’s a nice house, but frankly I believe that the $3.5 million they’re asking for is too much. That’s what mine was offered at originally, but I waited out the owners and pounced when they dropped the price to $3 million. My guess is that this one will drop to the same level. Continue reading →

In a recent post on Playborhood.com I wrote about the “Trick-or-Treater” index, a measure of a neighborhood’s child-friendliness based on the number of trick-or-treaters visiting a house on Halloween.

Well, my street’s results are in: Yale Road in the Allied Arts neighborhood of Menlo Park scored 200. That’s very good. However, just one block away, our friends and rivals on Princeton Road had a world-class sort of night. One family reported giving out 500 pieces of candy to trick-or-treaters! Continue reading →