One of the gifts my daughter got for her birth party was a Gund Teddy Bear. It was a typical looking cream-colored bear, but it had a velcro strap on the back so you could attach it to a crib and it played music.
Honestly, I thought, "errr, great".
We didn't actually remove it from the box for months.
I finally decided that I should at least let her see it. I tried strapping it to the crib and...
She was ambivalent about it.
For months, we had it in her play box and gave it to her occasionally She found the music buttons in the back of the bear and figured out how to turn them on. It was really cute. One of the buttons is a volume button, so she had fun turning up the volume every time we turned it down.
When I was packing for the hospital, I grabbed the bear because it was soft and wasn't one of her favorites- so, if it got dirty, well, it wouldn't really matter.
But the little bear has become one of her favorites. Perhaps it always was and we just didn't notice. She absolutely loves curling her fingers through the fur and it's almost exactly her size at 101/2 months, so I'm sure that it feels good have someone to cuddle with that is about your own size. She looks like the little bear in Country Bear Jamboree.
I'm personally really impressed with the audio tracks- they're very good. We have a couple of other "soothing" musical toys and their audio tracks sound like kid toys. This one sounds like it's a real recording of the ocean or a forest or a heartbeat. The music tracks loop, but they are well written, so it doesn't sound like the song ever ends and starts again, which is nice. And the audio stops after 15 minutes, which is nice.
I know that it was not intended to be a teddy bear for a baby to cuddle with, but if it wasn't meant for cuddling, why make it furry and cuddly? And if it was meant for cuddling, why make the buttons easy for a baby to use?
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