Selecta Turnello Toy

I bought this for my 23 month-old daughter's stocking this year. It's by far the most expensive single item that went into her stocking, but I figured it's so gosh darn cute. I love that little mousie head and all his brightly colored pieces. Besides it's hard to find a toy large enough to not be a choking hazard for a two year old, but challenging enough to not be a complete bore.

Initially I believed it was too challenging for my 23 month old, and wrote a review stating such. It brought her a lot of annoyance and frustration for a time, after having been ignored for the first couple of weeks post Christmas. My initial gripe was that when you screw the individual pieces on, they are really difficult to line up with one another to make the cute formations pictured. Instead the end point where each piece fits tightly up against the one before it leaves the pieces all helter skelter at different angles. This can be remedied by unscrewing all the pieces a bit and re-screwing them back, while holding them all in correctly aligned positions. You have to have big (adult) hands to do this. I played with this toy myself a number of times before I stumbled onto this solution for making them line up correctly; initially I'd thought it was impossible, which is why I kept playing around with it.

In any case, in the past couple of weeks, my 23-month old has learned to screw each piece on, with only minimal difficulty. She actually LOVES this toy. She says he's 'naked' when all his pieces have been removed and proceeds to 'dress' him with the individual pieces. It turns out that she just doesn't care that it's beyond her skill level to line the pieces up correctly. Mouse can totally have frumpy clothes so long as she gets to dress him herself.

So, bottom line, I jumped the gun on poorly reviewing this toy, but sadly Amazon doesn't allow one to up start ratings if you rethink a review. I'd give this guy about a 4.5 in light of my daughter's intense interest in this toy.