Brainy Baby Videos

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Other

As I said in the previous review, Lia has begun to outgrow the Baby Einstein Videos. I always see the Brainy Baby videos where they sell Baby Einstein ones, but from the TVs in SM, they seemed more boring, the production wasn't as good. And when we asked about it in Makati Cinema Square, they only had the one DVD that had many titles inside. So we thought it would have poor quality resolution that hurts your eyes when you watch.

But, I really wanted to get Lia a video that featured letters (she LOVES letters! She recites the alphabet during meals and while sitting on the potty and randomly throughout the day) and none of our Baby Einstein videos had letters, and in the store, I saw that Brainy Baby had one. The DVD cost more than P1000, but the VCD version only cost about P300. So, syempre, I got the VCD, anyway all I wanted was one video with letters.

When we tried it on Lia, it was like she was mesmerized all over again, like when Baby Einstein was new. She sat very still and watched intently, but also would shout out letters she saw, and laughed at the children playing. Mike and I found it incredibly boring. I fell asleep at the letter F. Lia loved it. By morning, she could already recognize many small letters (before the video she only knew the big letters) and knew that Ape, Acorn and Apple start with the letter A. And asked to watch letters several times through out the day.

Compared to Baby Einstein, the production looked cheap, the music isn't as good (Baby Einstein music is almost all classical), the animation was bad. The VCD resolution was awful too. So we decided, if we're going to get this kind of bad resolution for P300, might as well get the cheapo all-in-one from Makati Cinema Square.

A couple of days ago, Mike got the DVD that contained a whole bunch of Brainy Baby videos and Lia said she wanted to watch Shapes so that's what we did. And she just absorbed it all. Brainy Baby is more advanced, in the the Baby Einstein shapes video (Baby Newton) only features 5 shapes in 30 minutes, and the colors video (Baby Van Gogh) teaches 6 colors in 30 mins. The Brainy Baby Shapes and Colors video teaches at least 9 shapes, including star, heart, pentagon etc. And 9 colors in 45 minutes. It was long and boring but Lia loved it enough to ask for the same video the very next night.

So far we've only seen 3 of the Brainy Baby episodes and they're all kind of cheap-looking, reminiscent of old educational videos they force you to watch in the AV Rooms in grade school. But we've recaptrued the calming pre-bedtime effect once more, and Lia is learning so much so I can't really complain.