Fisher Price Loving Family Sweet Sounds Doll House: Not So Sweet

My daughter recently potty trained, and as is true much of the time she got the concept of peeing in the potty pretty quickly, but it took the promise of a doll house to get her to do number two. About a month and a half ago we got the Fisher Price Loving Family Sweet Sounds Doll House, which she picked from the four available doll houses at Toys R Us.

The first thing you need to know about this house is that is has been discontinued and none of the furniture add-on sets are available any longer. So for goodness sake, please don’t pay the full $79.99 retail price like we did – make sure you are getting a deep discount.

We didn’t find out it had been discontinued until we got it home and I got online to try and get some of the add-on furniture for it. Apparently it had been discontinued within weeks of our purchase of the house.

The second problem is related to the first, and that is that despite the fact that the house is a “Loving Family” house, the furniture sold for the other “Loving Family” houses doesn’t fit. If the house had been superseded by a newer, improved house, it is incredibly disappointing that a company that tends to keep its customers in mind when designing its products, like Fisher Price, has made a product line that isn’t compatible with newer versions.

The house itself is fine as a basic doll house. It comes with a small family of a mother, father, daughter, and baby, and a bunch of furniture, some of it permanently installed in the house. At first this confused me, because it means certain rooms have to be used as the designer intended, and the child can’t use the room intended as a nursery as a bathroom instead, for example.

Then I learned that the reason this is the case is because when the people or the cat is put on one of the permanent pieces of furniture, the house makes an appropriate sound – either the people talk or the cat purrs. The box advertises over 200 different phrases, but we haven’t heard anywhere near that many; my guess is about thirty or so, though I admit I haven’t sat down and counted them.

This is somewhat problematic, as it is a little bit difficult to line up the people with the proper spot on the furniture (there is a heart on their backs and a heart on the furniture – you are supposed to match them up) to make the sounds come out. My daughter has trouble doing it. The best solution I’ve come up with so far is to just turn it off – the house is just fine without the sounds.

One thing I did like about this house is that there is an on/off switch with two different volume settings, so it isn’t too loud and there is the option to turn it off. So that’s what we have done.

My daughter enjoys playing with her doll house, but unless you are getting the house at a deep discount, you might want to make sure you have one of the newer versions of the house.