When we moved into this house the thing I loved most about it were the hard floors throughout; a mixture of laminate, hard wood floors and tiles makes cleaning up after a large family a doddle, and they're easy enough to pretty up with rugs.

The problem is they're LOUD. You can hear every bang, tap and step from everywhere in the house - during the particularly nasty winter and spring of 2011 the racket of Hollie playing with her Pooh Bear ball was just about driving me to insanity. We solved the problem with a couple of foam footballs, although these were fairly cheap so became damaged - the theory was a good one though and the 'thudding' was much reduced, so when I saw these pretty pink foam footballs in ELC I decided to buy her one as I assumed the higher price meant it would be of better quality.

That actually is right, the ball is made of an extremely dense foam which makes for a soft but pretty solid texture. I suspect it would be more likely to break a window than the cheaper balls that we had previously, but this wasn't the reason we started using foam balls anyway so that's not an issue for me - they're practically silent in comparison to the plastic balls the kids play with outside and for me that's the main thing.

The ball doesn't act exactly how a 'normal' kids play ball would, but it has a bloody good go! It'll bounce to a reasonable height and has a good weight for throwing and catching games, this is more important than it sounds too as previous foam balls have proved to be a little too lightweight for Hollie to throw with any degree of accuracy. The tightly packed foam means it's comfortable to hold and adds an extra 'grippiness' for little hands, this isn't as pronounced as with the cheaper balls as this is far more dense so there's not as much give on the surface of the ball for fingers to grip.

My only irritation, and this is in no way ELCs fault, is that younger children than the recommended age of three years can bite chunks of foam out of the ball. Of course, a lot of homes that have a three year old will also have a baby in the house - I know I have, so need to be extra vigilant when sixteen month old David is wandering around near Hollie's toys. He did get hold of this ball once and although I was watching still managed to sink his teeth through the foam before I stopped him - well, to be completely honest it wasn't this exact ball but an identical blue one from ELC. I've been in a friends house when her similarly aged son actually bit a small piece from one of these balls (again, the blue version) and it was quite frightening the speed at which it happened, and also the fact that it could easily have choked the little lad. It can't be helped when you have ANYTHING made of foam and ELC make the age recommendation very clear, so the onus really is on the parent to keep a close watch on their children.

I'm more than happy with this pink foam ball, although I find it strange to be labelled as an 'outdoor toy' as I can imagine it becoming horribly filthy within five minutes of being played with outside. Part of this is obviously down to the pale colour of the ball, but foam plus mud (even dry mud!) is never a good combination! I paid £5 for this ball, which I admit is a bit more than I'd pay for a plastic football-type ball but it's worth it for the (relative) peace when Hollie is playing ball in the hallway.