Is your child's sippy cup ready for a showdown?

We've spent the past week updating the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products with new listings and testing out all manner of new kids' cups to identify the best of the best. We've scored and ranked sippy cups, kids' straw cups, and youth water bottles based on their ease of use and care, their durability, their attractiveness to kids and adults, and their value for the hard-earned dollars you have to part with to get them. Every cup we evaluated meets the guidelines of the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, meaning we've researched its chemical status with well-placed company officials at every brand and gave it a clean bill of health based on their published and verbal statements. And we're ready to publish the results!

The options for BPA-free sippy and straw cups and youth and adult water bottles has exploded since we published our first ZRecs Sippy Cup Showdown (two years ago this week!) and even since publishing ZRecs' first BPA-Free Water Bottle Showdown, so we've decided to make a few changes.

First, rather than covering all sippy, straw, and kids' sports cups at once, we're dividing the 2009 BPA-Free Sippy Cup Showdown into three divisions:

• Baby and Toddler Division: First kids' sippys with softer plastic spouts and early toddler sippys featuring small cups, reduced-tipping features, slow flow, or some combination of these to make those first swigs a cinch.


• Toddler to Pre-K Division: Faster flow, bigger bottles, flip-top lids, and straws meet a reduced imperative for spill-proof design as our children prove their ability to not soak your car, their toy box, and everything else in sight.


• Youth and Adult Division: Sport tops, tall bottles, and wide-open drinking spouts for the masters of fine motor skills and beacons of good judgment. Yeah, we know these aren't sippys at all, but it made us laugh, and maybe it'll make you laugh too!

For each division, we'll publish our findings in three posts, publicizing the worst, the good, and our Top Picks, in that order, and we'll spread these out over a span of a couple of weeks, interspersed with non-sippy product reviews, family stories, and investigations.

We're really excited to be publishing these reviews because there are so many new products on the market, and the way we've set up our scoring has led to some surprising upsets in our rankings. Some new companies have stepped up to the plate with great new products, and some of the biggest companies, formerly wallflowers, have asserted themselves in the BPA-free sippy cup market by turning their veteran product designers to outwitting some of the newbies. Watch how it all plays out in the days to come!

We'll wrap up our showdown with a great giveaway for sippy and water bottle lovers everywhere, as well as unveiling some exciting new features for the ZRecs Guide (although if you poke around in there you may start spotting signs of them already!)

To go ahead and break our posting schedule from the outset, we'll open the Baby and Toddler Division this evening with a post dedicated to the single worst sippy cup we have ever used, one which offends unsuspecting users the world over in its abject failure to perform the most basic functions expected of a sippy cup. Tomorrow, you'll see the rest of the worst baby and toddler sippy cups on the market, before we move up to the better ones and finally our Top Picks in this division.