Recently KangarooBoo won two Iowa Web Awards! The competition was pretty fierce, and we won two great categories: Best e-Commerce Website and Most Socially Responsible Company or Website.

Since we strive every day to make customers happy, create value and change the world, these two awards tell us we’re on the right track!

As many of you already know, KangarooBoo is very committed to doing good things in the world of children. KangarooBoo donates a portion of each and every sale to a children-related charity organization right there during our checkout process. One charity is chosen as the default charity, from our list of pre-approved charities. They all get rotated from time to time so every one of them receive extra exposure and funds. (Remember, you as the customer can change which charity the portion from your purchase goes to, from your account under My Stuff / orders. Please ask us if you are unsure about how to make that change.)

We are proud to announce the addition of two new charities to our pre-approved charity list.

City at Peace – New York
CP-NY is a local chapter of a national organization that works with teenagers to empower them to create safe, healthy, peaceful lives and communities. The program is a combination of activities that examine the interrelationship of the problems and conflicts that youth care about, and often suffer from. It also develops their capacity for addressing these issues. By using the performing arts as a vehicle, CP-NY is developing the next generation of engaged community leaders.

Bosom Buddies – Cape Town
Bosom Buddies is a non-profit Christian organization started and run by a mom to 3 kids. She was both frustrated and horrified at some of the treatments taking place at state-run hospitals where newborns and new moms receive next to nothing after labor & delivery. Bosom Buddies strive to provide a diaper bag to each and every new mom, filled with basic essentials for baby and mom. They want to ensure that no baby goes home without adequately clothed and each mom feels that their community do care and the birth is recognized and celebrated.

To read more about these organizations that KangarooBoo supports, click on the individual organizations names. We welcome your suggestions of other organizations to be added to our list of supported charities. Please email us and tell us more about the organization(s) that you would like to suggest.

Tell the famous Aesop’s fable, The Lion and The Mouse with this Lion and the Mouse puppet. We’ve also recently added other story time puppets by Zid Zid Kids.

View more from Zid Zid Kids

We recently received a new shipment from HABA and have been entering the products into our system. Over the next couple of weeks we will continue to add HABA products. In the meantime, do check out the new HABA arrivals. Here are some of our personal favorites:

We love this little Pushing Car. Why? Because big brother can push little sister around and vice versa.

And because our kids love to hide things all over the place. This little pushing car has a little compartment at the back for storing things and a little pocket for hiding even more of the kids toys!

We also love this adorable caterpillar rattle, the Clutching Toy Flapsi. It makes a clacking sound and anything that makes sounds for baby is a plus since it’s baby’s most heightened senses.

Lastly, with all the blocks the kids have, it’s always nice to have a bag to store them in. We think the Bag TiTaTo can do the job pretty well.

View more new HABA arrivals

Due to popular demand, we now ship to Canada. We have now enabled the site to create a Canadian ship to address during checkout. Hopefully this will make it easier for those who wishes to ship to Canada.

We are really big fans of Flensted Mobiles. We have a couple of their mobiles hanging in our house. We’ve added 15 new mobiles from Flensted. Here are 3 of our favorites:

Hedgehog Family	Post Card Mobile	Seahorse Blue

Here’s a little lesser known fact about Flensted Mobiles:

“Flensted Mobiles are produced in a very low carbon manner: Let me explain, instead of 75 workers every day drive into the factory and assemble mobiles, they work from their homes. Every 14 day we drive on 1 trip visiting all workers exchange unassembled parts for mobiles packaged and ready to ship. We save 75 x 10 days of driving every 2 weeks or approximately 200 days a year for each employee. Let’s say each live 5 miles from work they get 20 miles to the gallon it will then come out to saving 7500 gallons of gas a year. We have been doing this for over 30 years.”

- The USA Flensted Mobile Distributor

The ability to get notification when an out of stock item becomes available is a very common one for an e-commerce site. In an effort to launch in time for the holiday season, we had to put this feature off. We didn’t think that we would need such a feature so soon. To our pleasant surprise we had real trouble keeping a lot of our merchandise in-stock. We’ve already had to replenish our inventory several times. It’s hard to believe that it’s only about 2.5 months since we launched!

So in the last couple of days I spent some time and whipped together our “in-stock” notification feature. In an event that an item becomes out of stock, there is now a way to add your email to be notified when it becomes available again. This feature was released early this morning.