Toys with noise

Toys that make noise (electronically or otherwise) are well and good while they are actively entertaining your child.  However they feel more like landmines than toys when your child has finally fallen asleep, and the toys are strewn haphazardly across the floor.  Even if you had the foresight to turn off the toys that have off switches before nap time.  You are still faced with the problem off all the toys that, for whatever reason have no on/off switch.  So as you try to use ninja like stealth to leave the area where your child has fallen asleep, the noisy toys lay in wait.  One false step and a musical cacophony erupts, your heart leaps out of your chest, and you hold your breath looking at your child, hoping against hope that this sudden burst of sound will not wake them.

So let us better explore how these legal boobietraps work.

There are your standard old school baby toys, with noise making bits inside.  Mostly these are rattles that have a low risk of waking your sleeping child.  There are also the toys with horns or squeakers built in.  Which has always seemed inane to me,  they look like infant toys but really your child needs to be at minimum 18 months to stand a chance of having the strength required to compress the toy enough to make noise.  Where as an adult stepping on one will produce the loudest sound the toy is capable of making every time.

Moving on to toys that actually require batteries.

There are the type that blessedly have an on/off switch and then there is the hellish variety that does not have any means other than battery removal to be silenced.  Now of these two types there is a feature that some have and most don't; I'm talking about volume control.  I prefer to minimize the volume on all the toys that have this as an option.

However there is one toy that my son loves to turn on and off again rapidfire because that's the easiest button to push.  This toy has a volume control electronically built in, but it forgets that you turned the volume down whenever you turn it off.  And whatever genius was in charge of developing the toy thought maximum volume was a good idea for the default setting.

Of the noise making toys the ones I like the least are the ones that play a long musical piece off of one button push.  These are the worst to accidentally activate when your child is sleeping for obvious reasons.  And I would just like to go on the record saying that the vast majority of noise making toys my son has are toys that were given to him from friends and family.  I was not so foolhardy as to buy these musical landmines for my son, and yet here they are.