Sy has always loved play dough. Sadly for her, I usually make her the hippie homemade kind in homely colors. Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to make purple play dough? It’s hard! So when Sy’s best buddy Kara got this Hasbro Play-Doh Magic Swirl Ice Cream Shoppe, she was beyond thrilled. All those attachments and colors and smells! Micky busted it out one day and the girls were immediately entranced. They made oodles of ice cream sundaes topped with mountains of sprinkles and swirls. They hardly looked up for a half hour (almost eternity to a four year old). I have to admit, I was charmed. The sprinkles were so twee and the swirly cones of multi-colored delight were irresistible. All those cute little sundae dishes and little spoons were too fun. And the play-doh smelled so good; who can resist that old school smell? So, of course, I folded. I bought it for Sy one rainy day and set it up for her when she was away at school.
Begin rant:
Ooooh, I hate to type this out loud, but my baby LOVES the Learning Puppy. Why did I let Sy take it out of the Goodwill box? Why??
This is the sort of product that when I saw it, I thought, YES! Perfect $4.99 solution for our hair washing disasters! I’m totally scooping this up instead of focusing on baby spoons like I should be! But when I got it home, I realized that I would have been way better off spending that particular $4.99 on a latte to fortify myself for the impending bath…
It sounds good enough, doesn’t it? The Kidzkamp Shampoo Rinse Cup “prevents shampoo from stinging your child’s eyes with this clever shampoo plastic rinse cup. Its soft, flexible edge forms a water-tight bond against your child’s head making it easy to pour water and rinse out shampoo without getting it into the eyes. Your kids will thank you.” My kid would do no such thing. My kid wanted to rip that thing right out of my hands and huck it into the trash can. [A few words on Sy’s bath challenges: she loathes getting water on her unless it’s on her terms. Fall down at the lake - throw a hissy fit. Ummm….You are at the LAKE. Lakes are made of water? Get caught in a rain storm - insist on all new clothes and sitting in front of the heater for 20 minutes to dry off. Walk by mom when doing the dishes and get touched by a semi-soaked hand - dissolve into fits and run out of the room straight into the loving arms of a dry towel.]
Ed. Note: Today’s review written by Ashli, mom to two year old B. Thanks, Ash!
I’m a sucker. It was December, and I was trying to divert my toddlers attention from the fact that I was buying her a big ol’ Fisher Price farm. So as we cruised the aisle at Target, I looked for a way to distract her so she wouldn’t notice the box the size of a small Volkswagen going into the bottom of the stroller. And my eyes landed upon this - the Little Tikes PopTunes Melody Bead.
I put it in her lap and took advantage of the “try me!” button. The piano keys lit up! It played songs! She seemed enthralled. I added it to the bottom of the stroller and on Christmas Day it officially became unwrapped and part of the toy entourage.
First in a series of Post-Holiday Round-up: Lame or Game? is the chronicle of one gift with promise that didn’t deliver.
As far as holiday disappointments go, let’s begin with the GeoTrax GeoAir Mega Set, which my mom bought for her Grandparents’ Cache of Cool Stuff. This toy looks undeniably cool in the box, in the store. One has only to begin assembly to realize that while it may be cool for kids, it could cause parents to overheat.
Ed. Note: Guest Review Time!
The coolest part of the blogosphere is that I have become friends with people I’ve never met. This is the case with Jenna McCarthy, whose very funny book, The Parent Trip, I reviewed back in August. Jenna is one of the funniest women I’ve never met. Since I am so fond of her, I figured my readers would be too, so Jenna’s served up two reviews for your reading pleasure. Please enjoy installment one and tune in tomorrow for another dose. Thanks, Jenna!
Dear Sir or Madam,
Thank you so much for taking the time to create such an adorable little product! My three-year-old’s eyes nearly popped out of her head when she realized that Santa had brought her the pink plastic bubble-blowing monkey of her dreams. As you can imagine, when she saw that BBM even came with his very own bottle of bubbles (okay, it was a few droplets of watered down cheap-ass generic dish soap, but how was she to know this? The kid’s three. She’s hardly a bubble connoisseur.), she nearly wept with joyous anticipation.
Except—and you probably can guess what’s coming here—the effing thing didn’t work.
My cousin just sent me this link and I had to share. The folks at One Step Ahead are not playing an early April Fool’s joke on us, right? From their site, “Learning to crawl? Starting to walk? When baby is accident prone, the Bumper Bonnet prevents bumps, bruises, and tears. The soft, thickly-padded head covering acts as a protective cushion, shielding that delicate little head.”
Why not just tape towels to your kid and put all the furniture in bubble wrap??
I have so many other ways I can spend $12.95.
Dear Learning Puppy,
I have some bad news for you. I think it’s time for you to move out. No, you are not going to be shoved in the back of the toy closet (again) only to be resurrected by Sy in a couple of months. I can’t take the break-up/make-up routine anymore! It’s more serious than that. I think it’s time you move to the consignment shop at the foot of the hill, because Puppy, it’s over. Do you hear me? O-V-E-R. I no longer want to sing and play games with you. I don’t want to hug you. I’m tired of hearing about your YELLOW FOOT! I just want you and your blinking dog bone collar out of my home forever.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some good times together. I’ll never forget the time I gently tapped your nose and you said to me, “RED NOSE!” I felt like you really meant what you said. But as the years have passed, your once-charming ways have become one dimensional, almost superficial. I mean, how deep can you be when you are only surface washable?
This just in from my uber techie husband. Thanks, dude!
Am I just too used to well-made and well-designed products? Is it too much to ask for something that works as you expect it?
Since Baby G’s arrival, I was tasked by GHM to find a better monitor system. My feature list was simple:
- One handheld monitor, two camera system
- Night-vision in the cameras
- Monitor can automatically cycle between the cameras
- 900 MHz or 5.8 GHz (so it doesn’t interfere with our Wi-Fi network)
It literally took me days of research. A single camera baby monitor is simple. We have used the Summer Infant handheld baby monitor since Sy was born and it’s been great. (Sure the picture’s a little fuzzy, but it’s good enough to make out what’s going on.) But once I started to look for a system with multiple cameras, the search got much more complicated.
I’m a big fan of Elmer’s. Love your glue, Elmer. What’s not to love? It’s sticky, it sticks things together, you can pour a lot of it all over your hand and try to peel it off in one go. Hours of fun with a bottle of glue. So when I saw that they had a line of really cool paint pens, I jumped at ‘em. Elmer’s Paintastics come in a set of five “pens” with paint brush tops. The washable, water color paint is already inside, so all you have to do is squeeze to activate and voila, paint oozes from the attached brush and a water color masterpiece is born.
Only, they didn’t really work. In fact, I was so irritated by our Paintastics, I think they should be renamed “Pain in the Ass Sticks.”
Andie’s son Max got this Click Clack Tree by Plan Toys for his third birthday. Andie and I were playing with it and we honestly could not figure out where the “hours of fun” would come from. I’ve never seen a Plan Toys toy I didn’t like, but there is a first time for everything, right?
This toy is beautiful: a little wooden “tree” with tracks for the bug balls to roll back and forth along. And that’s all it does. The bugs roll back and forth and then you pick em up and do it again. It says three and up, most likely for the size of the bug and possibly dexterity of putting the bugs back, but most three year olds I know would do this about three times and then be off and running onto the next activity. Andie and I played with the bugs while the kids were on the floor doing something else. Sy, queen of the long attention span, sidled up and watched for a minute before skittering off to the next thing.
I saw this Boppy pregnancy wedge pillow at Mimi Maternity the other day and thought Oh! The perfect solution to my sleep troubles (as if).
I planned on reviewing it, but that aint gonna happen. I opened up the packaging and the pillow smelled SO GNARLY. I smelled the bag to see if that was the issue, but nope, it was the foam. The sour chemical smell was overwhelming. After reading so much about safe bedding and all that rot, I decided that airing it out and hoping for the best was not an option. I then went over to the new Boppy pillow I just got, hoping it would smell better. It was fine, luckily made from materials other than total toxi-foam.
YUCK, Boppy-People, YUCK!
I am a huge fan of Alton Brown of Good Eats/Food TV fame. I love his scientific/geeky/humorous approach to food. He’s also got some tasty recipes, I use any excuse to make his chewy chocolate chip cookies . Anyway, Alton Brown is not a fan of the uni-tasker tool in his kitchen. You know, like an asparagus peeler. What else can you do with it but peel asparagus? Alton demands his kitchen utensils to be multi-taskers (his one uni-tasker exception: the fire extinguisher). I tend to approach Sy’s toy purchases the same way. Is this toy only going to be good for one sort of game, or will it be more open ended and hold my kid’s attention long enough for me to peel my asparagus the old fashioned way, with a vegetable peeler. I got the Zolo Stacking Magnetic Acrobats (Stacrobats!) for Sy when she was about a 16 months old. Alas. I think this is a case of a toy gone uni-tasker.
Hoo boy, anyone who is anyone in our toddler set luuuurves this toy. It makes me insane. Why does everything in Fisher-Prices’s Laugh & Learn series make me want to run screaming from the living room? Regardless of my constant search for quiet toys, the toddlers in my life adore this hunk of plastic. It’s actually not all that bad, but for love of all things auditory, why on earth does the thing have to be so loud?? Luckily it gives you a choice of
1) SUPER LOUD or
2) You decided to take the toy to a Motley Crew concert and it got used to having TO SHOUT REALLY, REALLY LOUDLY to keep up with Vince Neil’s vocal stylings.
Ed. Note:
Jenny M and her kids have been on an art rampage. This review concludes Ms. M’s four part review of Crayola’s indoor/outdoor drawing instruments.
At first glance, these appear to be brilliant: first, they’re not markers, and second, they’re crayons that won’t break, because they’re housed in plastic like a twistable eyeliner, allowing for only a short drawing tip.
I bought these drawing implements for an airplane trip thinking that the gimmicky aspect of their not looking or acting like a traditional crayon or marker would contribute to keeping my two daughters busy. And busy they were, pulling the innards out and breaking them in short order. There is a serious design flaw here; the crayon inside is not grooved enough to require twisting to get it out—all you have to do is pull the tip. And then you have tiny pieces of a thin crayon and plastic casings everywhere, which from a waste standpoint is worse than regular crayons.
