Nana’s Tiny Town enables imaginative play within Spring Hill community

Nana’s Tiny Town Ice Cream Shop. // Courtesy of Nana’s Tiny Town

Located right next door to their current business Pop’s Sweet Shop, the Romanos are opening a nonprofit children’s museum on Spring Hill, Kansas’s historic Main Street on Nov. 24.

Dale Romano has lived a life full of service. He is a Navy Veteran, former construction worker, and retired from a duty of providing veterans with handicapped equipment. Once his retirement approached, Dale developed a hankering to scoop sweet treats for children around the tight-knit community of Spring Hill.

Child Playing with Toy Tools at Nana’s Tiny Town. // Courtesy of Nana’s Tiny Town

One of the significant reasons why they have settled in Spring Hill for their business ventures revolves around their ten cherished grandchildren.

“If you get to the root cause of the whole, why are we in Spring Hill doing business at all? It’s because my grandkids live down the block,” Dale’s wife JoAnn Romano says.

Following his passion in 2020, Dale and JoAnn opened up Pop’s Sweet Shop, predominantly known for their ice cream, yet they sell a variety of essential sugary fixings. 

Now, three years down the line, Dale and JoAnn had yet another urge to open up a business, helping keep Main Street in the small town afloat. 

Attributing the idea to their two daughters who are local teachers, the two suggested that an imaginative play center is something that could truly benefit the Spring Hill community. And so, the idea for Nana’s Tiny Town emerged.

“This way they get that adult-child interaction, as well as peer socialization. It’s not a drop-off. It’s where parents come and stay, and they meet each other, and they interact with kids,” JoAnn says.

Having built the entirety of the fun house themselves, they modeled it as if it were its own main street, with 15 different storefronts and a miniature bike path for children to get up and down their tiny town.

“This is a social cause because imaginative play is on the decline and it’s kind of being taken over by technology, as we know,” she says.

“Imaginative play is instrumental, it’s essential to growth. I said wow this is really a need that we are filling.”

Nana’s Tiny Town Child Musician. // Courtesy of Nana’s Tiny Town

During their building process, children would sit outside of the building that is now Nana’s Tiny Town, watching the family hammer and nail down what will soon be a place that they can call home, as they slurped and smudged their ice cream along the window panes. 

“We didn’t taper the windows intentionally to show little kids that, ya know, if you build it, you can have dreams and it can happen,” JoAnn says.

While the space is curated for ages between six months and seven years old, Nana’s Tiny Town also offers an area for slightly older children to partake in slightly more mature activities and clubs, such as chess, checkers, Legos, and other board games. 

The miniature metropolis serves as a free-thinking environment for young children, while also granting them learning opportunities as well as specific clubs. Nana’s Tiny Town will hold 20-minute ‘enrichment group play time’ three times throughout the day, offering an avenue to enjoyable educational advancements, with alternating themes each month. 

Prices for the Nana’s Tiny Town experience start at $10.99 for day passes, $29.99 a month for annual memberships, $59.99 a month for monthly memberships, and $89.99 for ten visit passes.

Nana’s Tiny Town Diner. // Courtesy of Nana’s Tiny Town

As they prepare for their grand opening next Friday, the married couple has launched a contest on Facebook where three children will be selected to play a large role in the kickoff of Nana’s Tiny Town. 

One child will be the ‘mayor’ of the tiny town, cutting the ribbon to the city as other kids embark on what will be the first of many memories made at Nana’s. Spring Hill’s Mayor Joe Berkey has put together a video that will be shown at the opening, handing off the keys to the mini city.

The other two selected children will have roles of police and fire chief, making sure that all the adolescents are safe and secure during their first day as newly found citizens. 

As the date grows closer, expectations and enthusiasm run high amongst Dale and JoAnn, hoping that their newly found nonprofit will be a long-lasting gem in the small city in eastern Kansas.

“The coolest thing about having a nonprofit is it creates legacy. It’s something that we can never sell, we donated it to the community. That’s the best thing because it really is the overflow of our hearts. It’s to serve the community and specifically to bring smiles to the faces of children and their parents.”