We're busy with several things we'll have for you soon:

• We've completed two more skin reaction tests of Pampers Dry Max diapers and are writing up the results, with one more test planned before we cap of this gusher. (ZRecs Research donors, raw results are in your inbox.)


• Jenni attended the first meeting of an advisory board to Britax in Charlotte, N.C. (Unpaid, of course, but with travel costs picked up by the company.) They showed the board new products (ready for launch and in development) and we brought a bunch of issues to the table on the future of safer and more sustainable car seats. More on those topics as they evolve and/or bear fruit.


• Tomorrow we'll be interviewing Rick Smith, head skullcrusher at Environmental Defence Canada and co-author of the excellent Slow Death by Rubber Duck. We've sent him a list of a dozen questions we really want answers to.


• We're reviewing new materials in the Carter's tagless story, including something pretty shocking that we need to make sure we fully understand before we talk about it.


• Jenni will be a guest on two Twitter parties this week to talk about safer kids' products. The first one, tonight at 10 p.m. ET, is hosted by the Holistic Moms Network, focuses on toys, and will also include Jennifer Taggart (aka SmartMama) and a rep from Sprig Toys. The second, hosted by Health Child Healthy World, will be on Thursday at 9 p.m. ET, covers all kids' gear, and also includes someone from Oompa Toys. Tonight's chat should use the hashtag #holisticmoms. As for Thursday's chat, HCHW has a lot of great door prizes you can win by pre-registering.


• We're getting ready to take public positions on two emerging consumer safety issues we have serious concerns about that you have probably not heard anyone talk about on any blog or in any news outlet.


• We're playing with a really cute new Plan baby toy and wrapping our heads around a GPS-enabled child tracking device. Look for both reviews soon.


• We're looking seriously at a new report on lead in kids' snacks and juice boxes, but with a lot of skepticism. We'll share our views soon.

Stay tuned, or subscribe and we'll bring our content to you.

When Z and I needed a break from octopus-watching at the Seattle Aquarium (she had been fever-free all morning but had developed one again during the outing) we found refuge in the second-floor cafe, where a lemon sugar cookie and peppermint tea (her) and coffee (me) held much promise for raising our spirits. The vacant, long-suffering look of my sick kid, even clutching her prized whale cookie, caught my eye and I raised my camera for a photo.

Z's grandmother works as a commercial portrait photographer, so our daughter is used to posing.


I want a picture that shows how you feel, I said.


And then she coughed.


The kid is finally on the mend - today's her first day with no fever, and we've been back in Texas since Saturday. Z cried for twenty minutes this morning when she learned she wouldn't be headed to her grandmother's house due to her fever the previous night, skywriting broken hearts and crossed-out happy faces at the ceiling from bed. When that storm had passed, however, she saw a fine day of recovery while Daddy took the day off work.

After a much needed blog vacation (we'd recommend it to anyone) we're looking forward to giving you the skinny on a bunch of products we've been testing, sharing some personal stories, and shedding light on what's really in a couple of questionable products by inviting you, dear readers, to join us in funding some crucial lab testing.

We'll start the new year with a renewed focus on concise but meaty reviews, pithy safety updates and analysis, and snapshots from our off-the-blog lives as we get back into the swing of this daily blogging thing. After that, some surprises.

Here's one for that third category: Z performing at her holiday violin recital. She was very proud of herself, and wanted you to see it.


Hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and have a bright outlook for the coming year. We're committed to making 2010 the best yet for Z Recommends, and for parent-driven consumer research and advocacy. Happy new decade!

United Airlines' Hemispheres in-flight magazine was recently taken over by Ink Publishing, a team of people with a track record of turning filler magazines into magazines that print stories that you might actually want to read. For the past several months they've been publishing, in addition to the travel and food stories you'd expect to read at 30,000 feet, some quality short-form features with a surprisingly web-savvy perspective - ice hockey, Etsy, and now, the tangled web of so-called "mommybloggers" and the brands that are munching on their brains and turning a growing segment of the blogosphere into Night of the Blogging Dead. We'd go further to sing the praises of this truly balanced article about the temptations and painfully obvious pitfalls of corporate-fed parentblogging, but, well, we're biased, because reporter Sarah Wildman not only spoke at length with us as a source for the story, and not only actually included us in the story, but called us


Sorry, I had to see that writ large.

Seriously, though, you should go read the article. Articles that show off the worst sell-offs of personal integrity without talking about the varied choices people are making or delving into how conscientiously some bloggers are addressing these emerging issues has gotten really old, so this is a breath of fresh air. We are immensely appreciative of Hemisphere's interest in publishing a broader (yet shorter!) summing up of this issue.

Today's agenda is simple. Announcements, then candy.

1. It's unfortunate that the term "biweekly" is so confusing

Anyway, we are starting up three new columns on ZRecs blogs, each appearing at least every two weeks, confusing terminology be damned. They are:

ZRecs Family: Licensed marriage and family therapist Terry McNichols will discuss family relationships and answer reader questions in ZRecs Family, our new advice and relationships column at The Tranquil Parent. Terry will cover the dynamics of relationships with your spouse or partner, children, in-laws, and parents, and she's opening the floor to reader questions for possible discussion and response in Q&A-style posts. You can submit your questions as anonymously as you'd like using our handy submission form, or read her first topical post tomorrow while she waits to hear from you about challenges you face in your family relationships.

Mini Media Mogul: Author and blogger Jenna Glatzer rounds up books and music for kids twice a month on Punnybop. So far she's been doing four reviews per column, ranking them from best to worst. We likey. Today's post (her second in the series, here's the first) takes a listen to (and shares video/music clips from four kids' CDs. Even her daughter gets in on the action...

Ask ZRecs: We're going to start publishing this once-occasional column on a weekly basis, because we get a lot of questions from readers about kids' products and how they work. We may play with the format and scheduling of this a bit, but we'd like to be responding to your questions in a more formal and regular way, so we're renewing our commitment to getting this going. Watch as we feel our way through it.

2. Lolly lolly lolly get your adverbs here

We got a few requests for information about HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) free treats in the survey responses from this month's ZRecs Network newsletter, which went out yesterday (if you haven't opened it, take a peek in your inbox - you have until midnight tonight to enter to win a free superhero outfit for your child from Little Capers!). We have some interesting recommendations we'll collect for a future Tranquil Parent post, but we saw this deal on Amazon today and, what with Halloween right around the corner, we knew someone would be interested in it.

If you know you need some kind of candy on hand for Halloween but hate buying the junk you'll see when you run to the store in the days before Halloween, or if you are the habit of keeping a drawer in your kitchen perpetually stuffed with sweets, you should take a look at YummyEarth's organic lollipops, which are on sale for about 50% off ($15 for about 350 pops).

I have never eaten a YummyEarth lollipop, and would even posit that the brand name itself is kind of an oxymoron unless you suffer from pica. But the fact that Z has never seen a lollipop she didn't like, and that these particular lollipops are free of so many things it isn't even funny, and have some pretty amazing flavor names, and are really cheap at the moment (they may be a Deal of the Day) conspired to make me mention them. They are vegan (no gelatin), declared to be wholly free of all kinds of allergens, they are organic, and they do not contain high-fructose corn syrup. And the four-cents-apiece price tag for organic candy makes my heart sing. Check them out on Amazon.com. And if you're the nothing-beats-chocolate type, we encourage you to buy Fair Trade. Children just like yours will be better off for it.

OK, you know if we're using the term "super" there is a pun involved. So sue me. But we're excited to tell you that our newsletter giveaway for the month of October is from Little Capers, a pretend-play favorite at ZRecs for their high-quality, non-commercial, non-violent superhero ensembles. We reviewed Little Capers in early 2008 and wrote about them again this year, making wildly unsubstantiated claims sure to draw the truth-in-advertising ire of the FTC. (That post is a parody, but the blog disclosure issue is not: We've been aggressive proponents and exemplars of transparent blog disclosure policies, have never received payment for a review, no longer keep any review samples, and will always clearly disclose any compensation for product mentions or promotions, as we are about to do right now.)

This giveaway is the first paid placement in our monthly newsletter, and it gives us warm fuzzies to see a company we love helping to support our site. ZRecs currently does not cover the time we invest in it by any rational measure, and we are trying to change that so that our game-changing investigations, unbiased and thoughtful product reviews, and in-depth product research can continue to come your way.

We also love, love, love how supportive our readers have been as we work to develop independent, integrity-driven ways to support our blogging. We got hundreds of comments in our quick survey last month that reflected overwhelming support for our work and faith in our ability to do this right. For those of you who offered detailed comments on what would work for you and what won't, we welcome that ongoing conversation. ZRecs readers, you rock.

If you work at a company that believes in what we do and is interested in stepping up to the plate, take a look at our advertising and service rate sheet. If you have any products currently in our review queue, please understand that paid services are offered independent of our reviewing process, and that the companies we turn to again and again for products to consider for review are those that welcome not only positive but mixed and negative reviews of their products. Still, we will disclose any current or future paid services at the time of our independent review. You stay classy, we stay classy, our readers trust us when we like what you do, and everybody wins.

If you don't currently subscribe to our monthly newsletter (last month we gave away a five-pack of ThinkSport water bottles) we invite you to sign up to receive it, and for a chance to be entered to win a great prize from Little Capers. Our monthly newsletter offers links to the best posts of the previous month across the ZRecs Network, a little inside information about what we've been up to or are working on, and a giveaway that is simple to enter and only open to newsletter subscribers. Add to that the fact that your interest in opening that newsletter offers us value we can sell to sponsors and thus support the ZRecs blogging you love, and it's win/win/win. Actually, I lose track of how many wins are involved. Once you're subscribed (and if you already are) you'll be eligible for our newsletter giveaways each and every month.

We'll send out the newsletter on Monday with a call for interest, and on Tuesday we'll draw winners from subscribers who raised their virtual hands to say "count me in."