Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing aka “Baby Brain Off”

We received the Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing secondhand, so I’ll preface this with we did not have the original head padding for infants. We also have the Winnie the Pooh version which seems to be only available at Walmart and $20 more expensive, so this review is Pooh-biased, but the chair is the same as far as I can tell other than fabric pattern and mobile animals.

Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing description

• Weight range: 5.5-30 pounds
• AC adaptor or battery (three not-included D cell batteries) powered
• Hammock-style seating
• Four-point reclining chair
• Six swing speeds for various stages of baby psycho
• 15 songs on the playlist
• One-hand flip up tray
• Removable head support (which we can’t properly review)
• 30-minute swing timer so you don’t rock your baby stupid
• Washable cloth seat pad

Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing impressions

I can never get the seat far enough back that it seems comfortable for a small baby. This means she’s slouching or sliding quite a bit even with the five point safety harness they include.

While she’s aligned properly, she’s also squished and eventually wants to slump forward. This could be remedied rather easily if the thing went back a bit further, or if she was a bit older.

The soothing nature sounds are terrible. I don’t know who thought that a tinny speaker blasting out jungle highlights was a good idea, but it sounds very much like tinny static from a cheap speaker with the occasional scream.

I’m not sure if infant ears are so untuned/undeveloped/water logged still that that sounds ok to them, but it sounds horrible.

The music it plays is absurdly robotic. It’s like someone grabbed an old MIDI file from the TRS-80 CoCo 2 days and decided to rehash it. It’s actually not what I would want a kid with any hopes of future music talent using. I feel the audio from this actually damages the brains of all around it.

The flip-up tray latching system is useless generally. It seems to require holding the swing still with one hand and prying the tray off with the other. It’s not particularly an easy open.

Sitting your child in the seat involves pulling the safety harness out from under them. There’s no way to not go digging to get it unless you have two other people holding the straps out. Baby will be sitting on strap plastic until you go digging.

Getting your child out of the seat is kind of a pain due to the angle they’re sitting, you end up digging in their diapers to wedge your fingers between the baby and the chair. This would be easier if the seat reclined more and there wasn’t that level of baby slouch going on.

However…

The Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing rocks

literally and figuratively.

I call this product Baby Brain Off. I don’t call it this because I use it to shut down my child, but I do call it this because it will shut down my child when she’s passed the state of doing anything for her.

Baby brain off has six settings. The first and lowest is the “I’m setting happy baby here for a minute while I do a couple of things” and the highest is “holy shit I think she broke a window with that cry”. I usually never go past five, and I generally turn it down as the fires of hell are extinguished from her eyes by the gentle rocking.

The mobile placement seems perfectly positioned to fascinate a two-month old, although it was too far when she was younger.

Things I’d like to see improved

It would be nice if this product had something to rotate the mobile around. It just stays in position and although fascinating now I think it’s going to lose interest before she’s out of the chair.

The seat needs to recline further. Both for baby comfort and for ease of getting the kiddo out.

The mechanism that moves the chair is too loud. I start feeling that it’s sounding like a cheap industrial music mix. It’s loud. Annoying. You know it’s running.

The speakers and music are terrible. Absurdly cheap quality, sound.

Would I buy the Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing?

Probably not. At two months I’ve learned the baby loves her carseat, and that’s all that she loves. I’d probably go with one of the rockers that allows for putting the car seat into it.

Car seat you can tilt back for easy baby insertion and removal. You can also go straight from the car to the swing, or vice versa if you’re attempting to get ready to go somewhere.

Transitions are a bitch when you’ve got a rugrunt.

Coming in at nearly $100 for the non-Pooh version, the thing’s  $30 more expensive than the base for the Graco SnugGlider, which works with your existing Graco car seat and takes up significantly less space.

The the Graco Comfy Cove LX Infant Swing is available from Amazon for $99.95