Mama Says…

I learned a tough lesson when our Ready, Set, Learn! Paz’s Radio Controlled Fire Truck arrived at the door: DO NOT tell your two and a half year old son that you have a new toy for him until you know FOR SURE that it works. Kids at that age tend to not take it so well when they know there’s a toy for them in the box and it turns out that said toy doesn’t work.

So the first fire truck didn’t work but the second one did, which I was able to determine after I’d spent a good half an hour trying to get the truck out of the goddamn box. The thing was locked down tighter than Fort Knox; at one point I had to bust out Dave’s pliers to get those wire twist tie thingies undone. PLIERS. To open a plastic fire truck. Seriously, does it really need to be packaged that heavily?

Anyway. Oliver was so excited when he got wind that another fire truck had been sent to us – and that this one worked – he could hardly see straight, and to say he likes it is an understatement. He LOVES it.

Me? I have likes and dislikes:

What I like about the Ready, Set, Learn! Fire Truck:

It’s easy to use. This truck is perfect for a kid his age; the remote control is easy for him to hold and the buttons are big enough for him to press without having to look down at it. The on/off switch underneath the truck is big enough for him to find and use himself as well.

It’s durable. This summer Dave bought a remote-controlled sports car that fell apart within a few hours of Oliver playing with it, to his (and Dave’s) dismay. Oliver had the fire truck bashing around all over the place and it kept coming back for more.

It’s fun! It lights up, it’s brightly coloured, the ladder goes up and down when the truck’s in motion and it makes noise. When you’re two and a half, it’s hard not to love a toy with those qualities.

It can be used outdoors. We first got the fire truck when it didn’t feel like a deep freezer outside, so I let Oliver rip it around in the driveway for a while and he had a blast.

What don’t I like about the fire truck?

It has a siren. A loud siren. A few minutes of the siren blaring is all I can handle before I want to bash my head against the wall and as far as I can see, there’s no volume control.

The four plastic characters that come with it are useless. It’s almost as though they were thrown in with the truck as extras instead of being made to fit it exclusively – in short, they’re awkward. Oliver had no interest in them whatsoever and they’ve since been added to the growing pile of little plastic toys that serve no real purpose.

It makes somewhat alarming noises if you don’t flip the switch underneath to OFF. For several days after we got the truck I kept hearing these funny noises coming from the toy closet in the den and I couldn’t figure out what it was – I alternated between being kind of freaked out and wondering if there were squirrels in our walls or something. Days later we finally figured out that that if left on, the truck comes to life every few minutes, revving and lurching forward spontaneously. Quite an annoying feature, indeed.

This is not a toy that Oliver is willing to share with his sister; they had a couple of nasty arguments over it until I decided it was a toy that one sibling would play with when the other wasn’t home. Although it is loud toy, it’s a toy Oliver loves and it buys me a lot of time – he will play happily with it for up to half an hour, which, for my boy, is a LOT of time spent on one toy.

Mama Says: Oliver loves it and it keeps him entertained, but I can only handle it in small doses before the siren starts to make me feel a bit crazy. It is, in my opinion, slightly overpriced at $34.95 – for that price I’d at least expect the four characters included with it to actually do something. However, the truck’s positives do outweigh the negatives and although it’s probably geared toward little boys, this is a toy that both my kids really enjoy playing with. For more information or to purchase the Ready, Set, Learn! fire truck, click on over to the Discovery Channel Store.

Check the Parent Blogger’s Network for more reviews of Discovery Channel Store toys.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 7:25 am and is filed under Kids, Toys.
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