The Use Of A Baby Gym

Sharing is caring!

We live in a time where there is a huge focus on health and wellness.  We are constantly being told that for our own health we need to eat right and exercise.  This advise is as important for babies as it is for adults.  The only real difference is how babies exercise.  They don’t need to go to a gym and do bench presses.  What they need is the chance to wave their arms, kick their legs, and start building up the muscles they need to do such things as holding up their head and sitting up.  A product that is really good for this is a baby gym.

There are a lot of different baby gyms on the market.  I personally don’t think there is any one that is best, or even a company that makes the best ones.  What it really comes down to is personal preference of the theme and design.  The one that my son used was the Fisher-Price Luv U Zoo Deluxe Musical Mobile Gym.  He loved it.  He started playing with it when he was only a few weeks old and has continued to be entertained by it for the last seven months.  This week we had to finally put it away because he has gotten big enough to pull the poles over and I don’t want the top of the gym landing on him.

Our gym takes 4 AA batteries (which we replaced constantly).  It has a mobile at the top which Nick loved to watch, and as he got older he liked to grab and pull the birds that hung from it.  It also played multiple different songs that lasted around 5 minutes and parent can choose from two different volume levels.  I heard these songs in my head all the time!  They just kept playing over and over.  The gym also comes with many different toys.  This is the one part that I think is very important when choosing your baby gym.  The toys and mobile were what kept Nick entertained.  Baby gyms are not cheap, so you want to make sure you get good use out of it.  Good toys can help you do that.  At 7 months old Nick still loves to play with those toys.

Our gym isn’t perfect though.  For one thing I never liked that you could either have the mobile turning or the colored lights blinking.  You could not have both.  Nick would have loved both, but since that wasn’t possible we usually just had the mobile on.  The other part I don’t like is that to turn the music/mobile/ and lights off (if they’re running) you have to move the volume switch.  On top there is a big button that can turn it on (if the volume button is switched to on), but it won’t turn it off.  If you hit the button when it is on then it just switches the song that is currently playing.  When you’re holding a baby the last thing you want to do is have to move a tiny switch.

You don’t have to have a gym for your baby to get exercise, but if yours is as entertained by it as mine was then it’s worth the money.  Nick is a baby that has always wanted to move, and his gym helped him do that.  It was especially useful at keeping him entertained when he was too little to care about much.  Nick’s gym has been one of his very favorite sources of entertainment.  I was very sad when I realized that it was going to have to get put away.  We will both miss it.