Jodi Norgaard had never imagined getting into the toy market. However, one day at the store with her 9-year-old daughter, she picked up a heavily made up and scantily clad doll named "Lovely Lola."
"It really hit me super hard," said Norgaard, of Glen Ellyn, Ill. "They were dressed so inappropriately. It was such a slap in the face to women and girls. Instead of complaining about it, I wanted to do something."
She founded Dream Big Toy Company and developed a series of sports dolls for girls that debuted in 2008. The Go! Go! Sports Dolls have received numerous awards and mentions in the press since then, and when fitness writer Kara Douglass Thom, a longtime Savage resident who now lives in Chaska, heard about them, she reacted in an unsurprising fashion.
"I flipped out," said Thom, "We were an active family. It was a family value in our house, so when I found a doll, a toy, that espoused those values, I was thrilled."
The dolls sparked an idea — an accompanying book series.
"I've always been very lucky to write what I'm living," she said, "and at the time, it was balancing my own fitness with motherhood, but it was also raising fit children."
She contacted Norgaard, who loved the idea, though she said she couldn't pay her yet. Unconcerned, Thom launched into her first book, about a soccer player named Cassie. She read up on the sport, interviewed a soccer coach, and sought help from her daughters in fashioning dialogue.
She moved on to the next book, where research involved taking swimming lessons, even though she had long been a swimmer. "I needed to be reminded about how it feels to be in the water and how it feels to struggle and learn," she said.
