A STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE House!
Written: Mar 29 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: lots of creative fun
Cons: inside is somewhat small
The Bottom Line: This is a fun toy that my daughter still loves!
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| goldjay's Full Review: Bandai Strawberry Shortcake Berry Happy Home |
My daughter received the Strawberry Shortcake “Berry Happy Home” when she was four years old. She had seen it on commercials and even in the stores and expressed to me and everyone else she knew, just how much she wanted it. Lucky for her, her grandmother took the hints she had thrown out there and bought it for her as a holiday gift. My daughter was overjoyed to get this house and sat and played with it for a long time that very day! She has continued to play with this over the years and just recently when we were cleaning out and getting rid of un-played with toys, she insisted that she still plays with this and did not want to give it up. So, it still sits in our family room and she does actually play with it on occasion still.
Details
This is a really cute little house. It is little too but it does the job pretty well. The house is strawberry shaped and it really does have a faint strawberry smell, even after four years (I just now went over and smelled it and I don’t think it’s my imagination!). The house stands just about one foot tall and it’s about nine inches wide at it’s widest point when closed. When opened, it is about eighteen inches across.
This house opens as if it’s on a pie plate. The pie gets bigger until there’s two sections of pie that make up the floor of the middle section of this house. The floor section is small but it is enough room for all of the accessories to be set up.
Assembly
This house comes out of the box completely intact. The only things you have to attach are the window boxes and the strawberry plant. There are also stickers that need to be attached to different parts of the house. The instructions give good guidance as to where the stickers should go and it didn’t take us much more than 10 minutes to complete the task of affixing the stickers.
Accessories
This house comes with a number of very cute accessories. It came with a dresser, chest, clock, and bed, complete with pillow and bedspread for the bedroom area. There is a wardrobe with hangers. It has a table and two chairs and a tiny tea set for two. There is also a very cute strawberry shaped lamp that actually turns on and off.
For the outside of the home, there are two flower boxes for the two windows. These were a pain to attach but they seemed to stay attached for quite a while after I put them on. My daughter recently removed them for some reason and I haven’t seen them since! There is also a small strawberry hanging from a plant that can be planted in the plastic grass outside the front door. Outside the door is a button where the doormat would be. If you press the button (or a doll steps on the button), a short “ting” is heard. This is the doorbell!
Dolls Not Included
Not included in this set are the dolls. The house comes furnished but with no dolls for play! The dolls that you will want to purchase to go with this set are the 5.5 inch dolls. They are the right size to fit in the chairs and on the bed.
Quality
The quality of some of the items in this house is pretty poor. The house itself has stood up to a lot of stuff. Much to the dismay of my daughter, my two year old likes to use this house as a step stool so he can reach stuff that was deliberately put out of his reach. This house gives him a good extra foot’s reach! We obviously discourage this behavior as much as possible but he has done it and the house is fine!
The furniture, however, has not stood up the same way. Both of the cute chairs have had broken legs to the point of not being able to repair them and the table ahs faced the same fate. The lamp is still ticking and even still lights up. Still, I was sad when the furniture started breaking as it was really cute. My daughter has made do with other doll furniture that she has!
Storage and Carrying
This product advertises that you can store your accessories inside and carry the house along with you. Well, you might be able to fit the furniture that it came with inside but don’t try to fit anything additional, like the dolls! Not only that, but you can’t store your furniture all set up. Rather you have to sort of cram it all into the house to make it all fit and then carefully but quickly shut the house up, hoping nothing falls out in the process.
As for carrying this with you, this house seems to have a lock, or latch. However, we have never figured out how to actually snap it closed. Thus, when you are carrying your house around, it can easily open up and all of your stuff will fall out! It does recommend holding by both of the handles and this does help but it does not tonally solve the problem.
My experiences
My daughter loves this little house. She is a huge Strawberry Shortcake fan and anything Strawberry Shortcake is great with her! She seems to have a fun time when playing with this house and making up her own Strawberry Shortcake stories. She doesn’t seem to mind that there is so little space inside of the house. The character seem to play inside and outside of the house as they do in the video episodes my daughter has seen anyway.
She was quite sad when some of her furniture pieces were broken. She hadn’t played with them rough or anything but they just were not made well enough to hold up to normal playtime. She compensated by finding furniture from her Fisher Price dollhouse (that stuff withstands all sorts of play!) and using that instead.
My thoughts are that this toy is expensive for it’s quality and it is really a shame because it could be a really cute toy. Nonetheless, my daughter likes it and it doesn’t have annoying electronic noises and it does encourage creative, imaginative play so it really is a pretty good toy. Do note though that it takes up a fair amount of storage space if you are going to try to put this away. Ours has lived on the floor for four years now so we just keep it against the wall and out of the way.
Recommendations
I would recommend this toy for girls who are old enough to know not to put things in their mouths. It is a really fun toy and very girly but it does contain small parts and parts that can break off easily even if they don’t originally appear to be small! So, do be careful in that respect. Nonetheless, my daughter has had hours of fun with this toy and she still does play with it on occasion. Recently she asked me if I could buy her a new one just so she could have the furniture again, so she has not quite outgrown it yet!! She is still having fun with it and making up her creative stories!!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 20
Type of Toy: Playscene
Age Range of Child: 6 to 8 Years
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Epinions.com ID:
goldjay
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Member: Allyson
Location: Maryland
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Back from our DISNEY WORLD Vacation!! Had a BLAST!!
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