Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Baby’s First Blocks

Durability:4.0 out of 5 stars Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars Educational:3.0 out of 5 stars 

My son received this toy as a gift for his 6-month birth­day. At the time, I remem­ber hear­ing about how some plas­tic toys (often made in China) con­tain harm­ful chem­i­cals that are known to cause can­cer and feel­ing con­cerned that this toy might be one of them. I didn’t do any­thing for awhile, see­ing how my son enjoyed play­ing with the toy and think­ing (stu­pidly) that if this toy were truly harm­ful, it wouldn’t be sold in the U.S. One day, I came across this toy on Ama­zon and noticed the warn­ing to CA res­i­dents under “Prod­uct Details.” I couldn’t believe it when I read this toy is made with harm­ful chem­i­cals known to “cause can­cer and birth defects or other repro­duc­tive harm.” I bet a lot of peo­ple who are giv­ing this toy 5 stars are not aware of the warn­ing. UPDATE TO REVIEW ON 10–28-09: Ama­zon has removed the warn­ing about the harm­ful chem­i­cals, and in response to an inquiry I sent them told me “Prod­uct infor­ma­tion from the item detail is added or deleted upon man­u­fac­tur­ers infor­ma­tion.” Ama­zon sug­gested I con­tacted FP, which I did, and the FP rep said he couldn’t find any­thing in their records indi­cat­ing the toy’s man­u­fac­tur­ing had been changed. The toy’s pro­duc­tion has not been altered since 2007. He sug­gested that per­haps the warn­ing wasn’t accu­rate, and that’s why it was removed. That may be, but it seems like a pretty big mis­take for Ama­zon to make on mul­ti­ple FP toys. I see now that none of the FP toys that pre­vi­ously had this warn­ing have it now. As for my son’s reac­tion to the toy, he liked to bang the pieces together and put them in his mouth, but he never both­ered to try to sort the shapes since the top doesn’t stay in place, as oth­ers have men­tioned. My son always removed the top and took out all of the pieces, no mat­ter how many times I showed him how to sort the shapes with the top in place. Talk about poor design! I should have given it 1 star for the “edu­ca­tional” rat­ing in hind­sight, but I fig­ured that the­o­ret­i­cally it could be of some value if a child didn’t remove the top. Also, Ama­zon wouldn’t let me go back and change my rat­ings. I just got another shape sorter for him from Ama­zon (the Tolo Rolling Shape Sorter), and within min­utes he tried to put the shapes in the slots because he couldn’t remove either the top or the bot­tom of the unit. Now that’s an edu­ca­tional toy!