AMAZON  Apple 30 GB iPod: A video iPod? A screen the size of a postage stamp? That's what I thought until my husband got his, and we realized that when your eyes are so close to the screen, and when the picture quality is so sharp, and when the sound is so crisp…wow. And it also plays music.

AMAZON  Olympus DM-10 Digital Voice Recorder: Okay, I admit that when my husband bought this, I thought it was going to be another one of those electronic toys that sits in the drawer after one use, but, boy, was I wrong! Our son has mild autism, and we've used it to tape every one of our therapist team meetings. The sound quality is great (even in noisy conference rooms with people at the far end of the table), and no matter how diligently I try to take notes, I ALWAYS get something more out of a second listening.

AMAZON  Apple MacBook MA700LL/A 13.3" Notebook PC: If you're in the market for a laptop, and you get the warm-fuzzies walking into an Apple Store (like we do), you can't really go wrong with this one. It's a beautiful machine—just look at it! It can run Windows XP, and it's not even that expensive: Apple refers to it as "a sports car for the price of a scooter."

AMAZON  Toshiba Portege R205-S2062 Ultra-Portable 12" Notebook PC: This is the laptop we used to build this web site, and we don't have enough good things to say about it (thanks, Uncle Barry, for selling it to us when our Thinkpad died!). It's less than 3 pounds, which is significant if you're running around New York City with a 4-year-old and all his trappings, and it's about half the price of the supposed "top-of-the-line" lightweight laptops, for no apparent reason. WARNING: If you work with it at Starbucks, you will be frequently interrupted by laptop-enthusiasts who will want to hold it for a moment to confirm its weightless-ness.

AMAZON  Kingston Data Traveler 2 GB USB Drive: My husband loves taking these drives back and forth to work. Yes, you can e-mail files to yourself, or put them in your Yahoo briefcase, but this is quicker and easier and big files are no problem: just pop it into a USB port and double-click.

AMAZON  Canon PowerShot SD700 IS 6MP Digital Elph Camera with 4x Image Stabilized Zoom : Ever since digital cameras came out, we've been impressed with the Elph's powerful features and small size. This one's getting excellent reviews: great performance and great pictures, and it also takes movies (if you have kids, you'll be using that feature a lot!).

DELL  Dell Dimension E520: Our desktop home computer is a Dell, and if we were buying one today, this would be the choice. A friend of ours believes in buying electronics on the high end of the middle-tier, generally getting a good price without sacrificing quality, and that's the criteria I used here—thanks, Alan! And don't forget, it's a Dell, so you can customize it up the whazoo.

SHARPERIMAGE  Bose SoundDock Digital Music System for iPod: My husband listened to every existing speaker system for iPods before we bought our Bose, and he found its sound quality to be head and shoulders (and ears) above the rest.