Today is the first day of September and The Baby Gardner’s THIRD Birthday! We’re so excited! We want to celebrate with all of you by offering FREE SHIPPING on any and all purchases made on our birthday!* Consider yourself cordially invited! It’s been an awesome three years and we owe it all to you!

* Enter code PARTY3 when checking out. Offer is valid on Sept. 1, 2010. Sorry, offer cannot be applied to international orders.

Hi gang! Want to win Baby Gardner merchandise? We’re hosting a fun giveaway on our Facebook page this month.

To enter, post a photo of your favorite little one on our Facebook wall. We’ll pick 5 random winners on August 31st!

I’m smitten on the idea of sharing these barrettes with my little girl. I totally admit I would wear these myself and I know she would love them too. Vintage chic at it’s best! Here’s some of my favorites I’ve tagged, but you can find the entire collection here.

Now if I go back to my own childhood I can distinctly remember my first lunch box. (Exhibit A)

I actually think Raggedy Ann was a hand-me-down from my big sis because I know it wasn’t long before the tin was gone and I had plastic Smurfs. (Exhibit B)

Truth be told, the vintage lunch pails and tins I really adore go back several decades further — back when lunch boxes for children were just beginning to appear.

In 1935, Walt Disney introduced the first lunch box targeted specifically for children (big surprise, right?).  By adding the image of Mickey Mouse to the pail, the concept of character lunchboxes for children was born.

However, these Mickey originals were only sold from 1935-1936.  It wasn’t until TV programming for children came about in the 1950s that the demand for children’s lunch boxes rekindled.  Hopalong Cassidy was the first TV show to give away the right to produce lunchboxes featuring Hopalong — and the rest, they say, is history. Children began begging for colorful lunch tins featuring their favorite characters. This trend persisted for decades giving lunch boxes a firm spot in American culture.

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Now, how do you enter? Well, here’s the thing. We want to be ‘liked’ — a lot. So we’re asking our loyal blog readers to recruit all your Facebook friends to ‘like’ our Facebook page! Every person that clicks the ‘Like’ button and leaves a comment ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE between now and June 12, 2010, will be entered in the giveaway. Recruit your friends to help you win! The winner will be announced here and on Facebook. Winner will be chosen at random.

I know. We’re shameless. But we hope you love us anyway. And the prize is well worth the effort, right? Sending lots of love and thanks to our bloggie readers! We wouldn’t be here without you! xoxo

Clownin’ Around:

It’s that time again. Wanted to share another vintage embroidery pattern with you. It’s yet another goody from my stash of vintage coloring books. Love those books! This one is my own personal homage to Irmi lamps. Read all about Irmi here.

Click on image for larger view. Enjoy!

True story – sort of.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the stereotype “pink means girl and blue means boy” became the popular trend in Western Europe and North America. It’s never been common practice in other countries.

There seemed to have been a serious effort in the early 1900s to establish characteristic colors for girls and boys. But it took decades to develop a consensus on what those colors were. For years one camp claimed pink was the boys’ color and blue the girls’. A 1905 Times article said so, and Parents magazine was still saying it as late as 1939.

Why pink for boys? Some argued that pink was a close relative of red, which was seen as a fiery, manly color. Others traced the association of blue with girls to the frequent depiction of the Virgin Mary in blue.

An excerpt from Ladies Home Journal, June, 1918:

“There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

It’s amazing what we learn from history. So where does that leave us today? Does it leave us mired in a stereotype where boys should never wear pink? What do you think? Let’s take a poll…