Fisher-Price Laugh and Learn Smart Stages Sis Musical Plush (Multilanguage) Review

My son is four, which puts him out the top of this one, so I'm reviewing it from the other side of the age range rather than in the middle of it. That's actually a useful vantage point, because we've been through the Smart Stages puppy years and I can tell you what these toys are like at month eighteen rather than day three.

The short version: Sis is a good baby toy with one properly annoying flaw, and the flaw is about cleaning.

Start with what works. She's soft, she's a decent size for a small child to drag about by one leg, and the five buttons on her tummy light her heart up in different colours, which is genuinely captivating at that age. More than eighty songs, sounds and phrases across three Smart Stages levels, covering first words, colours, shapes, the alphabet and counting. The Smart Stages idea is sound: you switch the level as your child grows, so the same toy asks more of them at two than it did at eight months. Most parents never touch the switch, which is a shame, because that's where the value is.

The bit I would think hardest about before buying is washing. She's a plush toy with a voice box inside, which means she is not machine washable. Fisher-Price say surface clean only, and she must not be submerged. That's a problem, because this is a toy designed to be cuddled, chewed, taken to bed and dropped in car parks by children who are working on some of the worst years of their lives for illness and general stickiness. A damp cloth and a bit of mild soap is what you get. Some determined parents have taken theirs apart, washed the fabric and reassembled it, and reported it still working, but that is a project rather than a Tuesday. If you want a soft toy you can throw in the machine when norovirus arrives, buy a plain one and get the learning from something plastic.

Sound is the other recurring gripe across the Smart Stages range. Reports are genuinely contradictory: some parents say the voice is too loud, particularly at three in the morning when a toy is knocked in a cot, and others say it's too quiet to hear in a busy room. The complaint they agree on is that there isn't a usable way to turn it down. A number of parents across these toys also report the audio getting stuck and repeating, and the level switch being fiddly. None of that is universal, but it's consistent enough that you should know it exists.

The multilanguage version deserves a straight answer, since it's the reason you'd choose this over the standard one. The globe button switches everything between English, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese. That's genuinely nice if your household already speaks one of those, or if a grandparent does, because the toy stops being a monolingual English thing in a bilingual home. What it is not is a way to teach your baby a language. A toy saying colours in French for ten minutes a day will not do that, and no toy will. Buy it because the language is already in your family, not to introduce one.

Practical notes. Three AA batteries, included, and like every toy of this sort it will get through them. And the eighty-plus figure counts every song, sound and phrase together, so per button there are fewer distinct things to hear than the number suggests. You will learn all of them. You will hear them in your sleep.

The verdict. A solid, well-judged first learning toy that babies genuinely love, undermined by the fact that you can't properly clean it and can't properly turn it down. Worth it if the multilanguage feature matches your household.

Who shouldn't buy it: anyone who wants a soft toy that survives the washing machine, anyone who is easily driven mad by repeated toy audio with no volume control, and anyone buying the multilanguage version hoping it teaches a language rather than reflecting one you already speak.