The Rainforest Baby Collection by Fisher-Price is the most colorful and kid-attractive line of baby products out today; for some reason I don’t understand, the current trend in upscale baby stuff is toward designer-style fabrics and detailing, which in my opinion is just ugly and baby-unfriendly. Rainforest, however, has a small cast of characters – a monkey, a parrot, and a treefrog – in a setting of bright greens and blue, and a binding theme of waterfalls and jungle noises.
I really hate the designer-fabric trend (you guessed that, right?) and much prefer items chosen with my baby’s tastes in mind, so even though the customer reviews I read online were lukewarm at best, I decided to try some of these brightly-colored items.
Products offered include a jumper chair, a portable crib/bassinet, a standard and portable swing, high chair, baby gym, and several accessories like stroller toys and crib toys. Overall, the quality is mediocre, and the price matches. Still, there are some really excellent products that are inexpensive for their quality – and these are matched by some real dogs that are overpriced.
I started with the bouncy seat, and was pleasantly surprised overall. Though it’s a pain to put the batteries in (you really need to pay attention to the directions), the chair itself is sturdy and well-made, and my daughter loves the vibrating feature. The mobile is set up so that when the baby touches any of the dangly parts (plastic monkey and perching parrot) she can activate the sound and lights of the rest. The best feature in the mobile: a play waterfall that lights up and sounds as if it’s really running.
The biggest drawback is that it’s hard to put my baby into the chair. The mobile is a hard plastic arch designed to remain fixed on the chair – though it does come off, it’s awkward and inconvenient to remove it. I sort of have to slide Scarlett under it to get her into the seat right, an awkward maneuver. Still, once she’s there, she’s pretty happy – and this child is hard to please.
With the bouncy seat such a success, I decided to purchase the big standard swing as well. With this, I was delighted. It has the same jungle characters in a peek-a-boo mobile with big floppy leaves, good sound, a nice strong swing arm, and the option of swinging side-to-side and front-to-back with a simple twist of the seat. Though – again – the battery installation is annoyingly complex, this seat has an AC option, swapping from battery power to AC with a flip of a switch. The baby tray on the seat flips up easily, as does the mobile, and it’s quick and easy to pop Scarlett into the chair.
Now, originally I had wanted to buy a Graco playard/bassinet, but with the success of these two Rainforest products, I decided to try the Rainforest playard/bassinet instead. It doesn’t have a hood or large storage area, two features that I found attractive on the Graco, but it is also less than half the price. This purchase, I regretted. The playard is sturdy and well-made – unlike many competitors, the diaper-changing tray is extremely strong and seems pretty unbreakable – but it lacks most features I wanted and was very difficult to set up, a major weak point in a portable playard.
It’s set up with four locking sides and a push-down middle support, the same way portable playards have been made for at least 20 years. But when I put the bassinet portion in, I found that stretching the corners of the bassinet over the edges of the playard wall was nearly impossible. I have my doubts that the stitching will hold up over time, which reduces the potential resale value of the system. Still – it was over a hundred dollars less. The diaper changing platform is sturdy, but must be removed and set aside, not flipped down like some of the other playard systems.
The cloth portions of the playard are not removable, and must be wiped clean. Then I read on the bag the whole thing can be packed in that even this, an entirely cloth piece, cannot be machine washed – !! So if I’m carting this around and the bag gets dirty, I get to wash it by hand, just like the rest of the system. This means that I need to find a mattress cover for the playard, covering up one of its chief selling points, the colorful pattern on the pad.
The electronic parts of the playard were also a huge disappointment. First, the mobile is made much more cheaply than the mobile on the Rainforest swing; it’s largely glued felt, not actual cloth construction. The leaves are glued on top of the mobile, not beneath, where the baby could see them. There is no vibrate option, and the sound is much inferior to that on either the swing or the bouncy chair, both of which have jungle-sounds-only options; no, to use the sound on the crib I have to play the annoying tinny electronic music I really hate. There’s a nightlight and light-show effect, but they are corny and lame. I’ll almost certainly look for some alternative to the whole thing, especially since it’s battery operated only and – again – changing the batteries is annoying on this thing.
Worst of all, after about a week of very light use, the mobile broke – an internal short, I think. The lights and sound still play, but the motion, the only part I really wanted, has stopped. I could probably return it, but Scarlett’s used to it; instead, I will take off the mobile and replace it with something else. That almost certainly means I will have to jury-rig something into safe position, which will destroy the bassinet’s resale value. I highly recommend skipping this purchase.
The baby gym, on the other hand, is another winner. It’s a little pricey compared to the other baby gyms on the market, but Scarlett absolutely loves it. Any non-electronic toy that can keep a 2-month-old child’s attention for more than a half-hour gets my vote. The gym is based on the same jungle theme, with the cutest characters being the giraffe (who holds up one leg of the gym) and the monkey, whose corkscrew tail allows him to dangle from almost anywhere on the gym. Almost all the dangly toys are removable and can be played with by themselves or attached to cloth hooks on the playmat. I don’t think it will wash easily, but so far it has wiped clean very well, and that and a little Lysol makes me happy enough.
According to what I have read about the high chair, I will not even try it; it’s supposed to be flimsy and subject to tipping over. A broken mobile is one thing, but I won’t take the chance of injuring Scarlett.
Overall, the Rainforest collection has some nice points (like the doll furniture set based on the Rainforest, which Scarlett is getting for Christmas!), but unfortunately the quality pieces are haphazardly scattered throughout the whole set. You can’t buy the whole thing and expect the same quality throughout – which is puzzling. The whole thing is reasonably priced, and again has the most baby-friendly appearance on the market, but it’s just like Chinese food for me – nice, but vaguely unsatisfying overall.
