Pet Nook — the puppy beside the dolls that cry real tears

Why the puppy does not cry real tears like the dolls

The cocker spaniel is Baby Paws — a different line from the same toy maker, sold inside the Cry Babies shelf and clearly aimed at the same child. She is plush, she comes wrapped in a swaddle bag you can carry her in, and she works like a Cry Babies baby: take her pacifier away and she opens her eyes and makes one of five sounds. No tears, though, and the box is marked 4+.

Beside her is the Magic Tears Pet House, a blind capsule holding one of the pets that belong to the mini dolls. Same unwrapping ritual as the Attic, smaller cast.

The puppy works the way a Cry Babies baby works, which is why she ended up on this shelf at all. She arrives swaddled in a blanket with her own pacifier; take the pacifier away and she opens her eyes and makes one of five sounds, give it back and she settles down to sleep. Open the blanket and the whole body is soft plush, light enough for a small child to carry by one paw. What she does not do is cry: there is no water to fill and no real tears anywhere in this corner.

Her box is marked four and up even though she is entirely soft, and the reason is the pacifier and the carrier rather than the puppy. If you are buying for a toddler who wants something to cuddle, the soft babies in the Crib start lower and do more. If you are buying for a child of four or five who has asked for a pet, this is one of the few plush animals that answers back, and the swaddle bag means she travels like a baby doll toy rather than being dragged by an ear.

The Pet House capsule is a different proposition: a sealed shell with a random animal inside, sized for the mini dolls from the Attic rather than for the child. It makes sense as a small addition for someone who already collects capsules and wants to give one of her babies a pet. As a first purchase it is thin — a few inches of plastic, no tears, no clothes to swap — and the arguments underneath the listing are all about the price of the shell rather than the pet in it.

Both residents are for girls and boys alike, and neither of them belongs to the main doll collection. Baby Paws is its own line from the same toy maker; the pet capsule is an accessory for dolls you buy elsewhere in the house. We keep them in a nook of their own so that nobody arrives here looking for a baby and leaves with a dog by mistake.

So be clear about what this corner is not. A cry baby doll has a water reservoir, eyes that leak and a pacifier that works as the switch; neither animal here has any of that. If a child asked for a cry baby doll by name, buying the puppy instead will disappoint her within an hour, however soft she is. The puppy is a companion for the dolls rather than one of them, which is exactly how most owners end up playing with her: the babies cry, and the dog is what the babies keep.

Ages and sets are the practical part. The puppy is a set of three pieces — the plush body, the swaddle blanket and the pacifier — and that is the whole box; there are no clothes, no bottle and no furniture. The capsule is a set of a shell, an animal and a sticker sheet. Both are marked for children of four and up, both suit girls and boys without any change, and in play they end up in the same scenes as the big babies: one child feeds a doll while the other walks the dog around the rug.

As a gift the puppy reads better than it scores on paper. She photographs like a cuddly toy, she costs less than an interactive baby, and children who already love the collection recognise her instantly from the cartoon. The capsule is the opposite — a good fifth present, a poor first one. If the child is old enough to look after a doll and has been asking for one, send her to the Crib or the Nursery Floor and come back to this nook later, when the house is already full of babies looking for somebody to play with.