Congratulations to Lisa from Ames, Iowa, who won our YBike giveaway. Her entry was selected at random from the 86 eligible entries we received by our giveaway deadline, and she'll have an orange YBike original shipped to her door in time for the holidays!

You can buy a YBike for your little one at YBike USA or a wide variety of retail stores, including Fat Brain Toys, Amazon.com, One Step Ahead, and others.

If you haven't checked out PRIZEY lately, check out the 60 current toy and game giveaways selected as Editors' Picks by PRIZEY editor Lacey Kelley. Most of these giveaways close in time for prizes to ship for Christmas, and there are plenty of great bets here for your favorite baby, toddler, preschooler, or big kid. Even if you don't enter many giveaways, PRIZEY is a great source for gift ideas -- we learn about a lot of new products (including some we end up testing and a few we end up reviewing here on ZRecs) by watching the river of giveaways go by.

If this wall of images crashes your browser, slows your computer to a crawl, or won't display, please let us know. We're experimenting with ways to showcase PRIZEY giveaways on blogs and would love your input as we experiment a bit.



There are exactly 500 open giveaways today on PRIZEY, including 40 more toy and game giveaways that didn't make this list. If you're looking for more great giveaways for your friends, spouse, or yourself, head to PRIZEY and start browsing!

ZRecs is officially sponsored this week by YBike, an innovative company that is redesigning balance bikes to push them further in the direction they deserve to go.

Longtime readers will know we've been fans of balance bikes for years. Balance bikes help young kids learn to balance, move independently of their parents with increasing confidence, and do all sorts of other things that go along with riding a bike before expecting them to master fairly complicated things like pedal and brake. Balance bikes are low to the ground, move as quickly or as slowly as their small riders push them with their feet, and provide a natural transition between balancing and standing on one's own two legs that makes it easy for children to experiment with their ability to balance on top of a moving frame.

Our daughter Z got a balance bike at around three. She didn't get really comfortable on it until sometime in her fourth year, however, and by five she was eager to move up to a pedal bike. Through hard work and persistence she then quickly learned to ride a bike without ever using training wheels, and was soon a confident (and adventurous) bicyclist. We thank her earlier experience with her balance bike for some of that drive and that ability to balance naturally while focusing on the new task of pedaling and braking.

YBike takes the concept of the balance bike a step further in two ways: by shifting the front wheel forward (YBikes remind us a bit of the Harley "chopper" motorcycle for that reason), which makes turns wider and decreases the likelihood of falling forward while turning, and by increasing the width of the back wheel, making it even easier to balance than on two tires. It's almost like a cross between a bicycle and a tricycle, except that the back wheels are side by side and thus don't widen turns the way a pair of tricycle rear wheels do. It's these form factors that have parents purchasing YBikes for kids as young as two, who use them through around age four. The YBike can hold 100 pounds.



YBikes sell for around $80 and are made of injection-molded plastic. Even the wheels are plastic, which has its advantages and disadvantages -- plastic is good on paved roads and dirt, less so on gravel or any bumpy terrain. The seat is non-adjustable, as an adjuster clip would raise the lowest seat height by a couple of inches. In our view, the YBIKE is an attractive first balance bike for a child who would struggle with a larger balance bike, most of which are ideally sized for three- to four-year-olds. If we had a toddler now, we'd be tempted to get one instead of a tricycle.

They come in green, blue, pink and orange, as well as in an "Extreme" version with an aluminum frame and a taller profile:

ZRecs Giveaway: Win a YBike!

Just in time for the holidays, we have an orange original YBike to give away to one ZRecs reader! To enter to win this $80 balance bike, send an email to zrecseditors (at) gmail (dot) com with your U.S. mailing address (U.S. residents only, please), "YBike" in the subject line, and the correct answer to this question: What is the YBike Schools Program? (Hint: You can find the answer on the YBike website.) We'll accept entries until Sunday, December 5 at noon CT, and will pick a winner at random from all correct entries. The winner will have an orange YBike Original shipped to their door in plenty of time for Christmas.

Fine print: One entry per household, entrant must be 18 or older, U.S. entrants only.

Want your company to be a ZRecs sponsor? A week-long sponsorship includes a clearly labeled, sponsored post discussing your product, a week-long display ad, and a giveaway hosted on Z Recommends and promoted on the web's largest blog giveaway listings hub, PRIZEY. Immediate slots are available, and our rates are reasonable. You can get in touch with us at zrecseditors (at) gmail (dot) com.

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."