LeapFrog Baby Counting Pal Review

The Leapfrog Baby Counting Pal is a plush caterpillar with a facial expression and cap that are familiar to all plush Leapfrog toys. She has a soft handle for carrying, five different-colored body segments with numbers on them, four feet with pictures of critters and various busy-baby contraptions inside, one foot that is actually a ring with four plastic flowers to spin, and four different settings for play. The settings are: Numbers, Colors, Classical Music, and Musical Medleys. That is also the order in which they irritate me. The parent's on and off switch and volume control are inside a velcro-closured pouch in the caterpillar's back. Cloth straps with velcro at the ends are fastened to the back. A female voice says rhymes and sings songs.

In the Numbers setting, she sings a different counting song to the same tune for all five numbers. I don't like this setting at all, because the songs take too long to get to the counting and are very boring. Colors is a step up because she sings a different song for each color - the Blue opera song, the Orange country song, the Yellow barbershop song, the Purple jazz song, and the Red reggae song. While the songs are mildly amusing, they are very short and each one is introduced by a very repetitive rhyme. Also, the female voice is gratingly overemotive for the material. Classical Music plays a few bars of a musical selection by Mozart, Boccherini, Bach, Vivaldi, and Beethoven. The sound quality is on par with other Leapfrog toys, and, at the lower volume level, is soothing and pleasant. Musical Medleys plays all the musical selections in a loop without introducing the composer first. The music lasts for about 4 minutes in my estimation.

The caterpillar's body segments are very thick and the sensors are hard to activate. Even I have to squeeze pretty hard sometimes and feel around for the right place. As a smaller baby, my toddler liked the songs, but tired of the them quickly and was mostly involved with the feet. The velcro straps on the back are for fastening the toy to something, like the bars of a crib, but I haven't found them useful. The one thing I really wanted them to do, which is strap the toy to the baby's tray on the stroller so she can't throw it on the ground, is beyond the ability of the weak velcro.

When HRH was about seventeen months, the batteries died and I never replaced them. She adores anything she can carry around by a handle, so the caterpillar travels all over the house. Usually, the play is limited to carrying it from one spot to the next, as if she is pretending to have a purse. If I could just forget all the sounds it ever made, gut the battery housing, and simply view it as a cute caterpillar with colors and numbers, I would probably think much more highly of this toy.