Following the walker we bought on Friday (see Controversial Toy for Darius), we now have even more new toys for Darius!

No, it’s not because we are on a crazed shopping spree or we have struck the lottery, as we did not buy these ‘new’ toys; they were actually rented. Lately, we felt that Darius (together with his mother :p) is starting to feel bored due to a lack of stimulating and interesting things for him to interact with.

Since a few months back, I’ve already thought about renting a jumperoo for Darius since he’s always kicking his legs and enjoys standing upright. However, Catherine advised otherwise as it could add strain on his ankles and knees. Also, it may cause him to become too active and make it difficult when we try to make him sit still while teaching him things.

In the end, we decided to get an exersaucer for him instead, which will still provide the stimulation tools he needs to learn. In particular, we rented the Safety 1st Bouncing Baby Play Place exersaucer after we read about it on The Upperroom blog.

I started enquiring several local toy renting websites and finally found a rental company which still has it.

Anyway, here are the links of the toy renting sites I have visited:

• Go Go Mummy
• Little Fairyland
• Rent A Toy
• Rent That Toy!

Support toy renting and minimise unnecessary waste to Save The Earth! (Who am I kidding? More of saving my wallet heh…)

As my rental was below S$40, I would need to pay for an additional S$12 transport fees. Therefore, I rented another toy to get over the S$40 mark — the Little Tikes Musical Motion Ocean Gym.

Darius talking to the one-eyed monster (aka fish)

It’s an electronic gym featuring inhabitants in the ocean, such as fishes and crabs and can be placed in three positions, catering to the different stages of the child. For Darius, we set the gym to allow him to interact with it while lying down on his back. In this position though, the only interactive gadget that he could reach was the crab-like toy at the bottom, which when pushed to the max (cons: it’s not easy to activate that switch as you will really need to push the crab all the way back) will activate some random sounds and lights, which reminded us of those we heard from the jackpot machines in Genting Highlands.

Depending on where the gym was placed with respect to Darius, the crab could be reached by either his hands or feet. When we placed the gym for his hands to reach, he would PULL the crab instead of pushing it, thus defeating the purpose of the switch. When placed for his feet to reach, he would occassionally successfully kick hard onto the crab (he probably had some feud with him to want to kick him in his face ^^|) and activate the switch for some fanciful responses in return.

Surprisely, despite the difficulty to trigger the lights and sounds from the gym, Darius appeared to be very interested in it and was constantly ‘chit-chatting’ with it. I guess it could be the eyes (from the fish and crab) that got him interested and treated the gym as a person.

Due to unknown reason, Darius had been babblering lesser nowadays despite we talking to him frequently, and so we were glad when he started to ‘talk’ again.

Back to the exersaucer, he was not interested in the toys on it when we first placed him in the seat. This wasn’t totally unexpected since he hasn’t been showing much interests in toys; he’s always more interested in interacting with real people instead. Though this is not a bad thing of course, it makes it very difficult for Catherine to leave his sight for long.

But as we gradually exposed him more to the exersaucer, he became more comfortable in it and started to observe the various toys while straightening his legs to support himself. He has not mastered the skill of turning himself (the seat can be rotated 360 degrees) though.

What we liked about this exersaucer is that the toys consist of figurines of people with faces on them. Darius tends to be more interested in things that have a face to it (judging from his interests in our japanese cat figurine and models of people in our display cabinet) so these toys are appropriate for him.

Though the exersaucer was disinfected and steam cleaned before it was sent to us, Catherine and I still have some reservations in letting him munch on the flower toys, as we spotted some stubborn patches of dirt on it. To play safe, We will need to go scrub the flower with detergent to ensure it’s clean enough for Darius’ ‘oral consumption’. ^^| Furthermore, the flower had been stretched so much by the previous ‘owners’ that it had been permanently bent to an odd angle.

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