You know when you get one of those gifts for Christmas or your birthday as a child that you always remember?! I was fortunate enough to have several like these when I was a child. I wasn’t spoilt but Santa was always really generous, especially considering he was a single mum to three children. One stand out memory was when I was given a tamagotchi – it wasn’t a birthday present or any other kind of present. It was mid the craze and everyone was going mad for them and my darling mother queued up outside Toys r Us at 6am after a night shift as a nurse to get one for my sister and I and we were literally over the moon to be part of the craze. Honestly, I’ve not been part of many crazes for a long time now so when I was asked if I’d like to review one of the new Hatchimals Fabula Forest I wasn’t sure what to expect. All I knew was that my nephew had thought they were pretty cool and that was it. Turns out, Alyssa was amazed and pretty happy too…
As I said, I had never had a Hatchimal before though obviously had noticed the craze – how could I not in my job, especially when they are everywhere. So my general idea was that you hold the egg and in some way a creature hatches from it that you keep as a kind of responsive pet afterwards.
Alyssa was intrigued right from the beginning as obviously I removed it from it’s box and it started making noises. I showed her how if you tapped the egg, it tapped back and she was making lots of squeals of delight. Checking the instructions, I began to rub the base of the egg and we started the hatching process…
We got the white lights and the red lights fairly quickly though it did take quite a lot of rubbing and the impatience of my toddler was wearing a little thin but then it is for slightly older children. However, when it did begin to hatch…
Of course Mimmie had to help us with the hatching too…
Once the hatching had actually begun it was actually quite quick – she loved it. For a little person it was truly magical and she watched in awe as this little furry animal with bright eyes hatched. We wondered which animal we would get as with the new Fabula Forest collection you could either get Tigrette or Puffatoo and we were delighted to see we had Puffatoo or as “she” is now called, Birdie.
Alyssa genuinely thought that the hatching was it so when it started interacting with her almost straight away she was over the moon. She was able to make it purr, stroke it’s tummy, make all sorts of noises and even move across the table towards her. It is quite noisy so for those parents wondering, it does time out and if that’s not enough there is an off switch on the bottom.
Overall, I was really impressed with the Hatchimal as it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was simply a cuddly toy inside which I was going to claim was way over priced but all things taken into consideration and when you look at similar toys on the market I’d say it was probably priced quite fairly – though the big spectacular of hatching can obviously only be done once.
If you’d like to get your little person as Puffatoo you can grab one here.
*I was sent the hatchimal for the purposes of the review – all opinions are my own.