Sylvanian Families – Cottontail Rabbit Family

Sylvanian Families are one of my guilty pleasures as a grown up (a pleasure shared by my brother and his wife), as my brother’s kids are just the right age to enjoy toys that we all had as children ourselves. Indeed, my parents let us keep our most prized old toys, stored up in their loft, when we grew out of them – so my nephews started their interest in Sylvanians on basis of toys that had belonged to us when we were little that they play with at grandma and grandpa’s.

This set consists of four characters

Cottontail Rabbit Father – Aaron Cottontail
Cottontail Rabbit Mother – Sorrel Cottontail
Cottontail Rabbit Daughter – Willow Cottontail
Cottontail Rabbit Son – Gromwell (?!) Cottontail

The characters are nicely dressed in removable clothing that is interchangeable with other Sylvanian Families characters. Although younger children (3-4 years) using the sets can play very nicely with them, they tend to need some support when it comes to re-dressing their toys. Younger children are GREAT at undoing velcro tabs and sliding off elastic straps, but are generally still developing fine motor skills needed to put clothes back on/do fastenings things up and can need a lot of assistance. The clothes are nicely made.

The Sylvanian Families website includes the names and biographies of the characters, so if you want the official names and backstories, you can get these easily… but there’s nothing on the box to allocate names/details beyond the ‘Cottontail Rabbit Family’ designation, so nothing to cramp freely imaginative play. Indeed, my nephews do something it never occurred to the oldest of my younger brothers and me to do when we had Sylvanians – they want the family set-up for favourite families to reflect theirs (two boys, mum and dad – NO GIRLS!) when playing and re-dress characters so that instead of a brother and sister they have a pair of brothers – like them.