Meg Paul

The biggest thing I hear is, ‘Wow, you fit so much in a tiny space!’ I like when people come in and they have that reaction where they look up and they look around and they’re like, ‘I feel like I could stay in here for an hour and still not have seen everything.’ That makes me happy. 

I have always been a toy lover. I still have ’90s toys that my kids played with growing up. I’ve got lots of stuff from when I was little. 

One of my favorite stores that I’ve ever visited is in Stanton, Virginia. It’s this toy store. It’s not the stuff you see in box stores. It’s things that are getting kids to play and use their imaginations. 

That place – I loved it. I just kept talking about it because we were going down to Virginia to visit family and my husband Tim was like, ‘You’re pretty in love with that place. Why don’t you do something like that?’ And I’m like, ‘I never thought about it, I guess.’ So we started going about getting ideas and seeing what we would do and where we would do it.

There’s really no electronics in here. It’s all play-based, educational, things that get kids moving and learning, because children learn through play.

I’ve worked in child care most of my adult life, either in preschools, in the school system, or staying at home with my own kids. I’ve worked at the Campus Center for Young Children at Goshen College, where I went to school. Lots of kid-oriented stuff!

I love the focus on downtown in Goshen, the First Fridays. The people who are actually there are invested in the downtown area and making it a fun place for people to go. As much as possible, we try to shop downtown because I want to keep this a thriving, amazing place. We’re on Sixth Street, and we love the fact that we can just walk downtown and go to the candy shop or go get our soap or go to John Hall’s. There’s so much