Hunterdon stores with games and toys to take you back

Childhood memories stay with us throughout our lives. Everyone recalls those carefree days when the world was just beginning to take shape inside our heads.

As we grow up, things that interested us as children are cast aside. Puzzles and games and toys end up in attics, basements and garages.

Youngsters have no inhibitions when it comes to play. Fooling around with whatever’s at hand is as natural as eating and sleeping. It is also a vital part of getting young brains acquainted with the world.

Mara Tippett opened her Sunbeam Toys last Halloween. The place is 650 square feet at 24 Bridge Street in Frenchtown, and it is full of toys.

“There’s something for everyone,” Tippett said. She concentrates on “toys that cultivate the imagination.”

There are science toys, toys for pre-schoolers, some classic tin toys, gags and magic, puppets, kites, balloons, weaving looms, jump ropes and microscopes. And so much more.

“We have a lot of retro toys as well as some modern takes on old favorites,” she said.

Tippet brings together quality and unusual things. She was a biologist before she launched this career, and her former interests peep out from the shelves here.

Customers tell her “this brings me back to my childhood…it’s magical.”

“I tossed the idea around for years,” she told me. “And I’m still learning.”

When children grow up, they leave behind the kids’ games that intrigued them when they were young. But the attraction of games remains. In adults, games mature into the strategies of chess, the pleasures of trivia, the challenges of puzzles.

“I’ve just completed the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle,” Heather Caroline told me. “It’s 32,000 pieces and it took me about eight months to complete.”

She plans to hang it soon. “It goes on the wall in my home. It’s called Double Retrospect.”

Caroline operates Lambertville’s The Missing Peace, an emporium of quality board games, puzzles, and related pursuits. She will be celebrating her fifth anniversary in May of this year.

“I always had it in the back of my head to own my own business,” Caroline told me. “I was a microbiologist originally, and I did lots of research before opening.”

This shop is stocked with a multitude of jigsaw puzzles, varying in size and shape. In addition to the familiar two-dimensional puzzles, there are three-dimensional puzzles as well. Try your hand at the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building and other world attractions.

But puzzles are only the beginning. The Missing Peace has chess sets, dominoes, dice games, cards and card games, and Rubik’s cube in many of its iterations. Plus party games, trivia, scrabble and others for both indoor and outdoor pursuits.

Attics, basements and garages get cluttered with all sorts of discarded stuff. When we no longer use things, they tend to accumulate around the house. Sooner or later, furniture, toys and games, decorations and other things can overwhelm the best of intentions.

It might be time to call Jennifer’s Found It!

“We are not a consignment store, but we do removal services when people are downsizing or moving,” Jennifer told me. Realtors regularly call her to remove items from homes, and she maintains wish lists for items when people are looking for special things, including decorators.

Found It! is more than removal services, however. It is a store in Flemington’s Turntable Junction. It opened in October 2011.

Here, shoppers find all sorts of wood furniture, dating from antiques to present day. Appliances are on the floor—from refrigerators to stereos from the 1960s.

But it’s a lot more than furniture and appliances. Jewelry, china, kitchen collectibles, decorations, signs, tools, toys and games round out the selections. There are GI Joes and Barbies here.