MARISA LASCALA

Hi! I'm Marisa LaScala, the senior parenting editor at Good Housekeeping, which most of the time means I'm writing or editing articles about children, like how to raise confident kids, get them to do chores and keep from blowing your top when they're being annoying. But if you ask my 9-year-old daughter what she thinks I do, she'll say I come to the office to play with toys. She's not entirely wrong.

SHOP ALL THE BEST BLACK FRIDAY TOY DEALS

If your family is like mine, they've been asking — let's say "gently reminding" and not "hounding" — for ideas of what to get the kids for the holidays. And if your family is really like mine, they've been doing this since Halloween, before the jack o'lanterns have even had a chance to rot. (Love you, Mom!)

I get it. They want to get some ideas before the big Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals evaporate. So when I finally gave in, here's what I told my relatives to get my 9-year-old.

SHOP SQUISHMALLOWS

SHOP STEM TOYS

SHOP SWITCH GAMES

Squishmallows: My kid has been really into dragons recently, and she's always been a collector of plush. So when I saw that Walmart had a sale on a huge, 20-inch purple dragon Squishmallow, I told my sister to snap it up. It's normally $68, but Walmart has a Black Friday sale that brings the price down to $37.
STEM toys: My mom generously offered to buy the Snap Circuits Flight Deck, a STEM kit that lets kids experiment with circuitry while building things designed to launch projectiles into the air.
Switch games: And finally, she always asks for Switch games. We've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom together, and I really like how you can come up with different approaches to all the obstacles in the game. I think it gives me a little glimpse into how her mind works, and now when we need an icebreaker, we ask people what their most-used echo is.