I've been playing a lot of Words With Friends lately on my iPhone, engaging in verbal combat with my mother, father, and random strangers in spare moments snatched from my day. Z has been eagerly horning in on this Scrabble-like action, making it clear that she's ready for word-building games. Enter Scrabble Junior.

In a world where most classic board games have a nonsensical "Junior" version (Hasbro is a major offender in this category), Scrabble Junior is a surprisingly agile adaptation. One side of the board of this version of Scrabble for kids six and up features larger, fewer, blank spaces for building words in traditional Scrabble manner - wisely eliminating the special spaces and even point values for letters - and the other, the truly ingenious side, features a completed board for the placement of tiles to spell predetermined words. This training-wheels version works better than it might sound; the rules are challenging enough for a six-year-old just getting down the basics of word-constructing game (letters must be placed in left-to-right order, and play consists of placing two letters from your hand), and it's easy for older players to help younger kids figure out the gameplay. Z is thrilled to play yet another big person game and enjoys the challenge of putting some longer words together than she's used to reading or writing. We'll soon graduate to the other side of the board, no doubt, where we can construct simple words together in the semi-collaborative play mode we use to teach Z most games.

We also appreciate that this game consists entirely of cardboard pieces, not plastic. The board, letter squares, and point tiles are all cardboard, making the game both more affordable (it sells on Amazon.com for just over $13) and less wasteful.

This game was purchased by us at a store, not sent by a company for review. We highly recommend it for kids ages eight to ten or so.

It's amazing how some people have the gift to perfect capture the soul and the essence of a person. My grandmother was one of those people, and photographer Hal Samples is too. He took this stunning picture of our Z, just weeks before her sixth birthday, while we were on vacation with extended family. The background was set up to take family portraits, but as the evening wore on, the photographs got sillier until people of all ages and sizes were jumping up and down getting mid-air shots of moms and dads and brothers and sisters. Z wanted to take one on her own and this was the first one.

This is our daughter. She is vibrant, funny and spontaneous, and has a boundless energy that has us constantly shaking our heads in amazement. This photo was taken well past her bedtime on the last night of a trip where she stayed up late most nights and popped out of bed early most mornings to play with cousins and new friends.

Happy Year Six, sweet Z. I hope you keep this joy and energy and love of play in your heart for all your days.

Plan Toys' miniaturized, legless Foosball Soccer game probably looks like a lot of fun. You'd only be half wrong if sort of fun is half of very fun, but we'll leave the math to you.

Now, our six-year-old daughter enjoys playing with this foosball game as much as anything we encourage her to play with us. She really likes full-size foosball, and kids work well on teams on a full-sized table, against each other or against adults who are not competitive jerks. But foosball is a game that simply does not work unless each player meets at least one of the two following conditions:

1. You have the mental capacity to manage multiple controllers along two vertices as a small ball rolls unpredictably past them.


2. You have the emotional capacity and sense of self-preservation to restrain yourself from reaching into the game and grabbing the ball when #1 fails you.

So foosball has a lower age limit - nothing wrong with that. Trouble is, that pretty much leaves this really cute miniaturized version of the game without an audience. Kids over eight will be frustrated by having to use T. Rex arms to control their team on this roughly 15" x 20" field. The lack of a "roll-in" ball chute means that you actually have to place the ball by hand on the center field line; the big problem there turns out not to be getting your hand out quickly but being fair - if you try to place the ball right in the middle and leave it still, neither player's team can reach it, and if you give it a nudge, well, you're deciding who to give the start to. This may not matter too much to an adult playing with a young child, but to a couple of children, it's a recipe for disaster.


The table is made of the same natural rubberwood and non-toxic paints and finishes that are behind all Plan Toys.


Some of the figures block the ball even when they are in "bottoms' up" position. It comes with two wooden balls, and dimples to store them in. Some sort of closure or containment device would be helpful; we've lost one of the two custom-sized wooden balls already.

The toy also needs feet of some kind - its natural playing surface is a coffee table - but the little pads you can buy at a home improvement/hardware store work fine.

We love Plan Toys line in general and most of the toys of theirs we've used, including a one-of-a-kind building set one of our favorite early toddler toys ever. But we can't recommend this misguided product, which really doesn't offer much use life for its $70 price tag.

You can find the Plan Toys Foosball Soccer game at Kangarooboo.

I played with LEGOs all through my '80s childhood, and loved them so much that they were the only set of toys I kept for a future child. I can't say I've championed all of the changes the brand has gone through in that time - most of the lines they invest most in now are merchandising tie-ins with specialized parts that integrate less fully with a big tub of LEGO bricks - but the company never lost my faith, in part by developing an amazing website where you can actually buy any combination of individual bricks you like (a practice we've taken up for a couple of special projects we'll write about soon). Our daughter Zella has become a passionate LEGO user; just this morning, completely ignorant of the games that would arrive in the day's mail, she and I spent a solid two hours building a cafe with a second-floor studio apartment for a local wizard. In my experience, LEGOs are an easy way for fathers and daughters to enjoy long stretches of unstructured play together. In our case, she served up orders of flat orange pancakes from one of those semaphores that doubles as a frying pan while I perfected the hinged breakfast bar at the other side of the L-shaped demonstration kitchen. With LEGOs, pretend-play enthusiasts and tinkerers can play side by side, equally engaged.

When the company recently announced it would be introducing LEGO-based games to the U.S. market, we were thrilled but also a bit wary. The line that has been active in Europe for several years, but we had no idea what to expect from games made out of LEGOs, which sounded both fraught with possibility and like a gimmick of LEGO Star Wars proportions. [Dodges overripe fruit thrown by Lego Star Wars fans] But from the moment we opened the first LEGO game the company sent us at our request - LEGO's Race 3000 car racing game - we have been engrossed by LEGO toys in a whole new way.

First of all, to play most LEGO games, you have to build it. And everyone knows that children who build to LEGO instructions will have no problem shopping at IKEA later on. Homeschooling tie-in, check.


Race 3000 features truly brilliant little cars made primarily of LEGO pieces we'd seen before, which "float" above racing lanes on clear 1x discs.




The six-sided die, a custom brick with an integrated rubber housing, is built as you play; every player has seven colored chips that they can affix to the die as they move through the game. Rolling on your turn could trigger movement in any (or all) players, if their color comes up. Two other items on the die indicate turboing to a checkpoint or taking advantage of a shortcut if one is nearby. Oil slicks pepper the course and can slow you down, and strategic lane changes at the orange checkpoints are a key element of this game's strategy - you want to avoid oil slicks, inside curves are shorter than outside curves, and cars in front of you can help you leapfrog further forward, opportunities and hazards that may combine or conflict as players move through the race.


But one of the most interesting things about this game is that the track is completely reconfigurable. In fact, the course shown at the top of this post is not the one provided in the instructions (it also includes an extra piece of grass and some flowers from Z's other LEGOs) but one we made after playing the "standard" game. The standard board setup is below.


Needless to say, this makes the game likely to remain pretty interesting to kids, who can customize distances between checkpoints, the frequency and drama of shortcuts, and the twists and turns in the track. The rules even offer suggestions for rule changes that can be introduced for "advanced" play; given the fact that the entire board is a built environment, and that many kids will have other LEGOs around that might make their way into play, this game could be the spark that sets the next generation's game designers' minds in motion.

We have been playing another LEGO game the company also sent us, but will reserve judgement as we've only played in two-player mode, and think it might work best with three or four. But this game, we love. The only downside to a game made of LEGOs is that it includes very small parts - those flat little squares for the dice are less than a centimeter long - and families unused to LEGOs might find this a challenge. LEGO seemed to anticipate this in providing extra die markers in each color. But we also learned an amazing fact (amazing to us anyway): that the little wrenches you get with any mechanic-themed LEGO set have a chisel-shaped tip to help humans pop legos apart! I played with LEGOs for 10 years as a child and never knew that.

The bottom line question about this product is, is it something for non-LEGO families? We say yes. The game is enjoyable to play and does not even revolve around building things, but building things as a part of setting up the game (for the first time, mind you; once you've built the board and pieces they all fit nicely in the box, largely intact) adds a new dimension to the game that has value of its own. For about $20, this LEGO game offers more than most games pitched to ages 6-8, and its malleable nature makes it an invitation to beginning game-making to boot.

A couple of weeks ago we posted a link to a hugely informative and potentially lifesaving blog post we found in our everyday scouring of the entire internet for useful child safety information. (OK, that's an exaggeration, but we do get around.) This particular post was about the fact that a person who is drowning does not flail their arms around and splash and scream. They slip under the water, resurface, and slip back under. Struggling is in fact pre-drowning behavior, which may or may not occur, but the fact that actually not getting enough air in the lungs prevents you from doing all of the things that get people saved in movies has tremendous consequences for our behavior. It also goes a long way to explaining how children so often drown in pools when their parents are home, or in bathtubs when their parents are feet or even inches away. Well-written, accurate, and surprising, the post was just the kind of news and information we try to highlight in the regular links we send to ZRecs feed and email subscribers. The post has received over 500 comments to date and its publication bookended a pair of truly tragic infant drownings within weeks of its appearance, and the author has since followed up with a post about mitigating home pool hazards.

Reader Lindsey replied to our posting of the link with a story of her own:

This struck a chord with me since my son had a near drowning incident in March during a swimming class, with 4 instructors in the pool with him. They all had their attention directed away from him while he was struggling in water that was 4 feet deep - just a little too deep for him to touch. He was only a couple of feet from the edge but couldn't make it there. I was watching from the balcony, where parents are required to sit during lessons, and saw the whole thing. Fortunately, one of the instructors turned around and noticed him in time. Like this article says, he didn't make a sound, but he was traumatized by the event and afterward was asking me if people die when their feet can't touch the bottom of the pool. Very scary!

Please, parents, watch your children closely around pools or any accessible water play area, do not assume that pool covers or fences will prevent a child from gaining access, and never leave an infant or young toddler unattended in the bathtub. And if you aren't yet a subscriber to our blog - which will not only get you access to stories we find like the one above, but also keep you abreast of our blogging on the rare occasions that we temporarily go dark, as we have over the past two weeks (we missed you!) please feel free to do sign up. We offer a full, not excerpted, feed of posts and links in RSS or email format, and our email digests arrive once each day content is published, packaged up with whatever links to outside content we've found that day.

We've completed our writeup of our Pampers Dry Max skin irritant testing and published a final report you can read online, download, print out, or share with others. We'll summarize a bit here, but the full ten-page report is useful for anyone who has cared about this issue, for anyone who cares about others who have been affected by it, and for anyone who thinks this whole issue is a media or corporate conspiracy. Read our study for yourself and see what you think.

• Measurement of Relative Skin Irritation of Pampers Dry Max Disposable Diapers

From the report:

We believe the most significant finding of our study is its demonstration that, when compared with a leading competitor or its own previous formulation, Pampers with Dry Max are more likely to cause extended irritation persisting long after the diaper is changed. Examining the behavior of this rash when the skin is repeatedly re-covered with another diaper which is then soiled or wetted on top of the persistent rash, was beyond the scope of this study; but it does not feel excessively speculative to posit that a rash so treated would be more likely to deteriorate further than skin that showed no signs of being compromised.

A more troubling finding, and a highly illuminating one, is that beyond this overall difference in performance, Dry Max Pampers from two different "batches" were associated with different levels of both initial and extended irritation. These differences were documented both by a blinded "scent test" and by their tracking codes. The batch linked to all cases of extended irritation, and which triggered the sole reaction to a urine-containing diaper in this study, was the batch that had been acquired from a consumer whose own child had suffered from severe diaper rash while wearing diapers from the same package.

Of all the people with whom we will ultimately come knocking to share our findings directly, we are most interested in sharing it with Procter & Gamble. We're interested in an ongoing dialogue with them and will be offering them the chance to follow up on our findings with some specific information that might shed further light on our testing and on their Dry Max diapers.

Read the study here, judge our methods and our analysis for yourself, and pass it on.

Thanks to all of those who sent or offered to send diapers for us to test, for those who read and commented on our draft versions of this study, and most of all to the readers who contributed financially to make this study happen.

Note: We're leaving comments off on this post because this report involved not only a lot of work but some personal sacrifice, and we'd like it to allow it to stand alone on our pages for consumers to access and come to their own conclusions about. That said, if you feel this report is meaningful or scurrilous, we encourage you to discuss, excerpt, reprint, distribute, analyze, and praise or pan on your own blog, with the lovers and haters on Babycenter, or anywhere else you see fit. If you talk about it on a blog, rest assured that we do read what other bloggers say about what we do, and we're sure your readers would enjoy the discussion as well. We are also always accessible to anyone upfront about their identity, and can be reached at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com with your questions, comments, and criticisms.

Don't know what this is about? Here's more ZRecs reporting on Pampers Dry Max than you can shake a stick at.