Guide to Choose Baby Playmats and Baby Play Gym

Baby activity playmats are a kind of play center designed for stimulate infant age between 0-8 months. The basic one consists of just a soft baby playmat with various textures embedded on it so that a baby can experience a range of tactile sensation when touching the surface of the baby playmat. Nowadays, baby playmats evolve into baby activity playmats which incorporate much more than just various textures on the playmats. They now have a variety of things embedded on them for the baby to discover. This gives a baby enough stimulation and activity during tummy time.

Another kind of play center for a young baby is called baby play gym. As the name implies, baby play gym is designed to encourage baby for a physical activity. It consists of either one or two crossed arches full with suspended toys. Babies are supposed to hit the toys hung on top of them by a baby play gym, hence a baby play gym is good for enhancing baby gross motor skills. The basic or old version of baby activity gym only has one arch with only a couple of toys suspended on it. Nowadays, baby activity gym consists of two crossed arches and is choked-full with a variety of toys to hit and explore.

The most sophisticated form of a baby play gym is called soft play gym. Soft play gyms are basically baby activity gyms combined with baby playmats. These toys are very educational, developmental and they benefit infants in many different ways.

Benefit of the soft play gyms

First,they provides a variety of sensory stimulation for your infant. When your baby is young, he can just watch the toys. When he's older and can reach for the toys, the suspended toys at the baby activity gym provide your baby with tactile stimulation. In addition, the baby playmats which have different textures and fun areas on them provide your baby with an additional tactile stimulation and cause-and-effect experience.

Second, each piece suspended on this infant toy gives you interesting things to talk about hence enhancing your baby's receptive language.

Thirdly, they will improve your baby's physical development. The baby gross motor skills will be improved as your baby tries to hit the suspended toys, and the fine motor skills will be enhanced as the baby graps, spin and roll the toys.

Soft play gym buying guide

In order for the soft play gym to be developmental and to get the maximum play value of it, we suggest you to get the one which has these followings:

• a variety of brightly colored-toys with different textures and sounds/noises. This will provide a multi-sensory stimulation.
• a variety of toys which can enhance your baby's motor skills in different ways, for example: toys to grip, toys to spin, toys to roll, etc.
• a variety of other activities , for instance activity designed to encourage baby to discover a cause-and-effect experience

At the beginning, your infant may not use all the activities available. But as your infant gets older, she should be able to explore these toys for increasingly longer period of times and use more and more features. One way to help your infant to play and discover the activity is to interact with your infant and to talk about each toy and activity found on the soft play gym.

One word of caution though. When your baby approaches 5 or 6 months, she will be able to pull the toy with more strength. Therefore, always supervise her while she's playing with her play gym to avoid accident.

Our recommendation.

Based on the above criteria, we find that the most state-of-the-art and complete soft play gym we can find is the award-winning The Tiny Love Gymini Kick and Play Total Playground. This toy consists of a baby playmat and a baby activity gym.

The baby playmats ensure your baby to get a nice and soft mat to lay his back on while playing with the baby play gym. But their function does not stop there. The baby playmats also have activities on their own to make your baby busy and entertained during the tummy time. Here are the things your baby will find on the baby playmats:

• crinkly and squeaky areas.
• peek-a-boo flaps.
• baby mirror to encourage your baby to lift his head.
• electronic light and music touch pad which plays music (two modes) when it is kicked, hit or touched by your baby, hence providing a cause-and-effect experience.

The baby activity gym of this toy consists of a number of toys which can be spinned, rolled, spinned and even pulled. In addition these toys have various textures and have bright bold colors. When your baby gets older and does not use the soft play gym anymore, all the suspended toys can be removed from the arch and played separately. The activity gym also has extra rings to allow you to hang your baby's favorite toys.

In short, we think that this toy gives so much benefits to the baby and is truly developmental. Unlike other activity gym, your baby can use this toy from birth thru 10 months. Therefore we highly recommend it.

This toy can be bought in any toy store. However, we recommend you to buy Gymini Kick and Play Total Play Ground by Tiny Love in our favorite store, Genius Babies. They have a huge selection of other playmats if you don't want to buy the Gymini playmats that we recommend. In addition, they carry a complete selection of competitively-priced quality award-winning baby toys. We find that it's hard to find these toys in one place locally. Not to mention the stress of driving and queeing at the check out at our local toy store. Therefore, we tend to just order what we need for our baby in Genius Babies.

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Links to other educational baby toys articles:

Guide to the Best Developmental Infant Toys for Babies 0-6 months

Guide to Baby Developmental Toys for Infant 6-12 months

Baby Educational Toys Main Page

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