If your child is anything like mine I am sure they have loads of bath toys…. too many to be honest!  After bath time, I always used to pile them all into a empty washing-up bowl and leave the bowl in the bath.  The problem with this method of storing the toys is that I couldn’t drain them properly and I had to pick each up one individually to pop it in the bowl. This bath time ritual of tidying away the toys was made much quicker and easier when I was sent a Whale Pail to review from OXO Tot.

It is a bright blue bath scoop made in a very modern ‘whale shaped’ design. The whale pail slots onto a holder on the wall and then the water is able to drain out due to the drainage holes on the bottom and on the sides. The holder which sticks to the tiles or the wall has a choice of adhesion methods. You can either use the suction pads or you could use the adhesive sticky pads. At first I tried using the suction pads but I did find that when the pail was full of toys the suction pads wouldn’t stay put and the pail kept falling off the wall. This happened a few times and then I decided to try sticking the holder to the tiles with the adhesive pads. This has thankfully worked fine and the pail has stayed in position and done it’s job successfully. I have the whale pail stuck to the tiles but the supports on the bottom of the holder are resting on the side of the bath as well. (Please note that just because I couldn’t get the suction pads to work well on my tiles doesn’t mean you will encounter the same problem….it may be that my particular tiles are the issue).

The whale pail is normally around £20 which is much more than I would pay for a bath toy storage product but it is currently on offer at Amazon for £12.99 with free delivery.  This price is much better but still a little more than I would personally pay. Having said that, if space is at a premium in your bathroom then just under £13 is a reasonable price to pay if it helps you keep the room looking tidy.  There is also the added benefit that when you use this whale pail for storing bath toys you feel better knowing that the water is being allowed to drain out properly and you are not leaving them in a pool of old water.

Another couple of things you may like about this pail are that you can scoop up the toys after the bath, rather than picking up each toy individually, like I used to and you could wash your child’s hair using the drainage holes at the bottom as a sort of ‘shower’ type affair.

My daughter really likes the cute design of the whale pail and she thinks it is great fun to tip all the toys out of it when she first gets in the bath. Whereas I like the whale pail as it allows me to try and keep some order in my small bathroom. It can very quickly look messy if all the bath toys are allowed to be scattered everywhere and the whale pail has stopped this.

If you would like to buy a whale pail from OXO Tot then they are available from various online stockists. As I mentioned before Amazon currently (Sep 2011) have it on offer at £12.99.

OXO Tot make lots of wonderful products…such as the Candela Tooli Night Lights for children that I reviewed here.

To keep up to date with all the news and offers from OXO why not visit their website and then follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

By the way…just in case you are wondering…which I’m sure you are…OXO Tot is not the same company as the OXO who make the stock cubes! 🙂   You can read more about the OXO Tot company here.