The Eric Carle Portable Soother and Star Projector ($24.99) is designed to help babies self calm and drift to sleep with imagery and relaxing music. It’s small enough to tuck into your diaper bag to bring along while traveling.
The soother plays a version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Rockabye Baby, and rain sounds. The lullabies are both calming to parent and baby. After about ten minutes, one starts to forget that music is even playing and it’s easy to imagine easing into sleep.
The sides of the cube are decorated with artwork from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is adorable and charming. It comes with a small plastic stand so that the cube can be angled to project small stars and butterflies onto a wall—a sweet bedtime depiction to mesmerize your little one while he or she winds down for the night. It’s important to note that if you wanted to project light onto the ceiling (which is my preference) you would need to sit the cube on a tall surface. Either way, to focus the light clearly, the cube needs to be somewhat close to the wall the light is being projected on.
There is a touch sensitive button on one side for changing the volume and another button for toggling through song and light options (blue, green, or orange). I feel like toggling through the options during wind-down time is like a sound and light beacon call to my toddler to throw a tantrum over wanting to handle the cube and also toggle through the options. I would have preferred to have a separate button to adjust light and sound. The cube is powered by AAA batteries. There is a place to attach an adapter power cord, but no power cord came with the product.
While a nice addition to wind down time, we actually found in our home that we had to turn the sounds and lights off during sleeping time for my 18 month old toddler. He is a light sleeper and benefits more from having light white noise on in the background than music and lights. I can see this as a useful tool for infants or for toddlers who wouldn’t be distracted by the projection. When my son was younger we used two products, the Cloud B Sleeper Sheep and the Twilight Turtle. This cube reminded me of some of their functionalities toned down and put into one tool that could be taken on the go.
Overall, the Eric Carle Portable Soother and Star Projector is a sweet and simple tool for easing your little one into a relaxing evening.