Wicked Uncle – Gift Buying For Kids Made Easy!

Gifted for review

I am not an uncle.

Neither am I particularly ‘wicked’ – in either the modern or traditional sense of the word.

I do however own a 3 year old who ‘needs’ new toys with the same level of desperation that I ‘need’ more sleep. And whereas I have little to no chance of having my sleeping needs met, Joshua recently had his toy needs well and truly met, courtesy of the good people at Wicked Uncle who sent me some pretty awesome items to review!

What Is Wicked Uncle?

For those who aren’t as clued up as I am with regards to online toy retailers / gift buying for kids, Wicked Uncle is a website that makes buying gifts for the small people in your life as easy as a few minutes spent clicking and reading. The site is pretty easy to navigate, however much (or little!) you know about the likes and dislikes of the lucky person you’re buying for. You can search by age, gender and gift type or, if you’re really struggling to know what 4 year olds are into these day, you can search by what’s popular.

Once you’ve picked something you then get the choice to have it gift wrapped and sent directly to them or to have it sent to you so you can apply the finishing touches. If you live miles away from the recipient / don’t really like children / can’t wrap to save your life, the gift wrapping and accompanying card is quite a handy option, especially given the standard delivery is under £3 and arrives in 2-3 days – ideal if you’ve left it a bit late to start the gift-buying process!

The whole thing is pretty easy, so you would really need to be borderline useless to balls it up!

Clearly, I know a lot about Joshua, and am rather fond of him, so searching for toys for him is actually pretty good fun. I went for the option of searching by age, so went hunting through the 100+ items that would be suited for a 4 year old boy. Every item has a good description with a decent few photos and quite a few have videos too, which I found pretty handy. After much deliberation and cogitation I went for the Design & Drill set and the Pokibot Mini Robot.

A couple of days later the package arrived…

All started well, as I had put Joshua’s own name down as the recipient on the delivery address, so he was pretty excited to see that before we’d even got inside the box! But get inside we did…

Design & Drill

First off we had a go with the Design & Drill – pretty much a guaranteed winner given how much Joshua loves drilling things and things that light up. As you may have guessed, Design & Drill involves drilling things that light up – more specifically a variety of coloured screws that you drill into an illuminated board to make pretty patterns. It’s actually pretty good fun, but probably not something that you should whip out for the first time 30 minutes before bedtime, like we did!

Suffice to say that Joshua has spent more time screwing over the past 3 days than the average DIY enthusiast would do in a lifetime.

Pokibot

The Pokibot was more of a mixed bag in terms of Joshua joy, and he has a very much love / hate relationship with his new robotic buddy.

At first he loved watching his constantly smiling new pal, as it moved around the table. We had suggested that perhaps the robot would talk to him (given you can record 3 short messages for it to ‘speak’) but in his mind that meant that the robot would therefore be able to answer any question he posed it, like a slightly jerky, mobile Alexa. I then recorded ‘Hello, Joshua’ which the Pokibot forthwith repeatedly said to him, prompting unbridled excitement.

Then things turned sour from out of nowhere.

Whether Joshua started to think that the robot might come into his room and stare at him during the night, or whether he thought that it might take over the world (albeit in a fairly jerky fashion) he suddenly asked for it to be turned off and ran away. Maybe we should cut down on the family time we spend together watching Terminator…

He did regain his enthusiasm when deciding what to name him though:

‘What shall we name the robot, Joshua?’

‘His name is Joshua’

‘But that’s your name’

‘Oh. Well his name is Robot’

‘Um. OK. Sounds great’

We’ll give it a bit more time with this one to see if they manage to rekindle their early love, or whether ‘Robot’ will indeed decide to take over the world. Only time will tell.

Overall

All in all, I was really impressed by the whole process of gift buying for kids from Wicked Uncle. The selection is great, the website is stupidly easy to navigate, delivery is cheap and it comes really, really quickly.

Whether you’re a wicked uncle, a groovy aunt, or a completely clueless cousin – if you find yourself gifts for kids it’s well worth a look.

Wicked Uncle did kindly provide the toys for this review, but all thoughts, opinions and attempts at humour are very much my own. And Joshua’s.

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