I really love the Lamaze range of baby toys, and my daughter is gathering a good amount of them in her toy box. For Christmas, she received a Lamaze gift box from her grandparents which included several different Lamaze items including this set of Gardenbug Wrist Rattles an Footfinders, which costs just under £9 for the set on the likes of amazon.

Within this set, there are two wrist rattles, and two footfinders, which are meant to be put on the appropriate parts of your baby and with the rattle noise encourage discovery, hand eye coordination and even inspire pretend play. Well since my daughter is almost five months old, the pretend play element is not really appropriate to her.

On both the wrist and foot parts there are gardenbugs, which are stuck on the material. There are two different bugs on the wrist rattles, and a patterned strap attached to your baby's wrist with velcro. As your baby moves, they should hear the rattle and be able to locate the noise and ulimately find their wrist I suppose. There are several problems with these wrist rattles, despite them looking extremely cute and colourful. Firstly, they are not easy to get on a wriggling baby, who is wondering what you are doing with their arm. My daughter will hardly sit still to even allow me to put it round her wrist. Secondly, when I have got it attached, the rattle is so quiet, that there would need to be no other noise in the room for her to even hear it. She isn't in the least bit interested in this thing on her wrist, probably because she doesn't really want it on, and she can't hear anything exciting from it. I have completely given up even attempting to put these on her now, and that is after several failed tries.

The footfinders are actually worse. These are meant to act as socks on your baby's feet. The big problem with these is that they are not a good fit at all. They aren't shaped like socks to fit baby's feet properly, as there is no heel, and they are extremely difficult to get onto the feet. When I did manage to get one on, with a rather agitated baby wondering what on earth I was doing, My daughter had it kicked off, simply by moving her legs, so there is absolutely no staying power either. She never even got a chance to listen for any rattle, but it too is faint like the wrist rattles. These footfinders may have black and white colours which my baby usually likes to look at, but these have not captures her attention in the slightest and are simply not made well enough to slide on to baby's feet like a pair of socks.

All in all, I am a big fan of Lamaze, but these are the first product that I have from their collection which I think are a complete waste of money. My daughter, who loves to look at anything and everything at the moment, shows absolutely no interest in either the wrist or or footfinder, which doesn't say much for the product. The footfinders in particular are not designed well at all. Very disappointing!