Almost every parent will agree: travelling with small children is a nightmare, but this Prime Day deal could be a real winner.
Firstly, it’s the sheer amount of stuff you have to pack. A one night stay with grandparents? It’s still a two suitcase minimum job.
Books, toys and endless changes of clothes. Secondly, the nice novelty we adults enjoy from collapsing onto a hotel bed, freshly made by someone else, does not extend to small children. Bedtime routines, slavishly built over time to now run with military precision to make sure parents have something resembling an evening, go out of the window. You will cling to anything that keeps familiarity. That is one of many things that makes the Toniebox such a brilliant purchase and it’s on offer right now as part of Prime Day 2022.
The Toniebox is an audio player designed for young children. It’s a soft box that's virtually indestructible, and it plays using 'tonies', little figurines who each hold a story or some songs on them. You stick the figure on top and the story plays. That’s it.
My three-year-old son is obsessed with stories and it’s been brilliant for him. If it takes a while for him to go to sleep, which is often, then he can have as many stories as he wants, and, it's screen free, so no worries there.
Crucially, it’s also incredibly portable. You need Wi-Fi to set up the Toniebox and for each new tonie you buy, but once you’ve put a figure on top of the box once, the content will be downloaded onto the Toniebox in full, thus you can take it everywhere, in the car, in the garden, camping, and, on foreign holidays.
We took it to Greece in April, it’ll go with him to his grandparents’ house next month, and on every holiday or night away we have. It has seven hours battery life too, so if you’re going away for a week, you’ll need to take the charger, but there’s no need to have one next to your kids’ bed and risk tiny fingers going where they shouldn’t.
The range of figures is increasing all the time, but all the classics are there. On both sides of the pond, you’ve got Disney classics like Frozen, Moana and The Lion King, all the Julia Donaldson big hitters like The Gruffalo and Zog, as well as more soothing characters which play sleepytime songs and white noise. They’re easy present ideas for aunts, uncles, grandparents and godparents, with the range growing so quickly.
There are also creative tonies, which allow users to load them with their own content. You can download stories and songs from the tonies' website, which has a range of free songs and stories on there, and, if you want to, record your own audio.
Want a message from a grandparent? Or maybe to record something if you're away from home? You can drop it into a playlist via the tonie website and you can change them anytime.
A Toniebox isn't a cheap investment. A box with no figures bar the introductory fellow, who is dressed in a wolf suit like Max from the timeless story Where The Wild Things Are, comes in at £69.95. Starter packs, which come with four characters to kickstart your collection, are even more expensive, at £109.99. Once you’ve got the box, every new Tonie is £14.99.
However, it’s Prime Day and you can pick up 20% off on the box and a starter pack of three character tonies. It comes in at £87.99, a saving of £22. With expensive licensing fees to pay for the characters, tonies rarely come down in price, so this is a good charge to make a decent saving.
If you just want to try the box itself and not commit to any characters, that's down 20% too, from £69.95 to £55.99, a saving of £13.96. As we've said above, tonies aren't cheap at £14.99 each, so we'd recommend investing in a bundle to get you going.
The Julia Donaldson bundle is my pick of the deals, but that's down to personal preference rather than anything else. There are lots of options and each one comes in a variety of different colours.
