Welcome to another edition of You Bought It, where we take a peek at interesting stuff ZRecs readers are buying through our Amazon links. As mentioned previously, we (and every Amazon affiliate) get lists of products sold through our links on Amazon.com - in our case, these purchases fund much of the consumer research and consumer advocacy we do. (ZRecs gets a small commission from Amazon for sales of anything you purchase on a visit to Amazon which originates from our site or one of our customized Amazon URLs - not just the item we linked to, but anything purchased in that shopping trip.)

Last month we thought it would be fun to share some of the interesting things we see purchased this way with our readers, since we count some of the savviest parent shoppers among our readership. And guess what? It is! The response to You Bought It #1 has far surpassed even our optimistic assumptions, so we couldn't wait to do this again. So between our original research and reporting on SIGG, Carter's, nanoparticles, and checking out products at Las Vegas' ABC Kids Expo, we have been keeping an eye on the purchases being made by ZRecs readers through our Amazon links. Here are some interesting trends and purchases we've noticed, with plenty of tips, video demos, and recommendations sprinkled in.

This edition covers reader purchases from August 13 through September 26, 2009.

You Bought Stuff to Eat and Drink With

In the inaugural You Bought It we offered a pretty detailed breakdown of sippy cup sales that came on the heels of our head-to-head reviews of sippy and straw cups for infants up through late preschool. We saw a lot of purchases of adult water bottles this month, due no doubt to the SIGG BPA mess and the series of recommendations, ZRecs Guide updates, and Water Bottle Showdown that followed on ZRecs blogs. I don't have time to crunch the numbers to the same level of detail, but can say that Camelbak kids' and adult stainless steel bottles were purchased in the greatest quantities, followed by Thinksport insulated stainless steel water bottles.

Which reminds me of something we've been meaning to post about Camelbak. We recently praised the advances the company made to their bite valve flip-top lid's design after using their stainless steel kids' bottle, but even in praising it we didn't realize it has a button to release the flip top! Check it out:


Thinksport is poised to add a couple of shiny metallic colors to their lineup, but asked us not to publish photos of the samples they had on hand at the recent ABC Kids' Expo trade show, because the colors there weren't a perfect match. But you can look for blue and purple being added to the Thinksport lineup soon.

A few readers purchased Trebimbi Click utensils, which we reviewed (and were politely asked to defend) last year, and Lunchbots stainless steel food storage containers. We really liked their Uno single-compartment container, but were less thrilled by the divided Duo, but it was only through our browsing of readers' Amazon shopping that we discovered their Pico (a smaller version of the Duo) and Eco (a deeper version of the Uno), which are great products for Lunchbots to add to their mix. We've added both to the ZRecs Guide, along with a lot of other stuff this past month.

Readers also bought a lot of Kinderville Little Bites silicone kids' food storage jars, bowls, and cups, which we loved, really liked, and weren't so thrilled about, respectively. The relative numbers were consistent with our own assessments. In other words, a lot of people bought the storage jars, a good number bought the bowls, and fewer bought the cups. (And yes, they were high enough to be statistically significant!) We'd be really interested to know if anyone bought all three, because our stats from Amazon don't offer any info regarding items purchased together. If you bought some Kinderville dishes, let us know what you think of them now that you've had a chance to live with them a bit. Any down sides to silicone we didn't consider?

We also saw several sales of a few water bottles we haven't written about, and even a couple we didn't yet have in the ZRecs Guide - KOR Tritan water bottles (which I might be able to wrap my head around if it didn't look like the front of my old Mac G4 and cost $30) and cheap Aquasansa glass water bottles, to name a couple. We have the KOR in the Guide and will add the Aquasansa bottles if and when we can check some materials information with the company.

You Bought Books

Our readers make some fantastic book selections, both on parenting topics and in books for kids. Here are a few:

• A Hole Is To Dig by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak: We adore this book. It's one of the better "weird twists on defining objects from a child's perspective" books, which is one of the things Ruth Krauss, like Margaret Wise Brown, loved to do.


• Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman: Recommended to us by Adrienne, which is about all the recommendation we need. Still, no time.


• Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming parent-child relationships from reaction and struggle to freedom, power, and joy by Naomi Aldort: This is one of the better parenting books we have actually, um, read. It's really very good. It deals with the parent-child relationship as a journey together in which both have a lot to learn - in other words, we not only don't "have to" be perfect as parents, but by treating our children as our emotional equals whose feelings deserve the same respect and exploration as our own, we get to learn from them as much as they learn from us.


• Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health... And What You Can Do About It: Whoever bought this should send us a report!


• Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn - And Why They Need To Play More and Memorize Less: Explores the "Einsteining" of the American baby, and why it's a bad thing. In short: Don't push your young child to be "high achievers" in areas you perceive to be "adult" (writing, reading, etc.). Remember that play is the work of childhood!

You Bought Toys and An Awesome Bike

We were excited to discover wooden toy brand Woody Click, whose Farm In A Box runs $100 but looks like a pretty dense package of small, high-quality stuff. It's an unusual format and we'll see what we can get our hands on from the company to test out.

We really, really wish the themed versions of Kettler's Balance Bike, like the Kettler Sprint Balance Bike one reader bought this month, were around when we bought one for Z. Back then there was only the primary colored one, and she would have flipped for this version. They also have a cool chopper-themed one.

Last but not least, someone bought our new favorite Plan toy - the Miracle Ball Pounder. No, this is NOT the Plan Toy we highlighted last month (and, in fact, we have deliberately avoided mentioning purchases of toys in this post that were highlighted in You Bought It #1, of which there were many, because that would lead to a rift in the space-time continuum which, if not corrected through the use of a Delorian and a Hoverboard, would ultimately lead to the destruction of the known universe). You can see it in a compilation of Plan toddler toys we played with recently at a trade show - they're all really, really nice, and the Miracle Ball Pounder is second in this demo. Luckily for me, Jenni discovered the hammer:


We love the pounders, but the musical toys shown in that video are among the best wooden musical toys for preschoolers we've seen, and all are on sale on Amazon: the Plan Toys Oval Xylophone, their Solid Wood Drum, and the Toy Percussion Set.

You Bought Other Stuff

This past month or so also saw sales of several CARES flight restraint systems. We have highly recommended the FAA-approved CARES system for air travel with young children, and have noticed that in the time since we first started using it, we have basically stopped getting questions from flight attendants checking to make sure they're legit for takeoff and landing. My guess is that they're seeing more and more of them. ZRecs' readers purchases of CARES restraints during holiday travel periods - and the fact that CARES' manufacturer, Kids Fly Safe, appears to be doing well even during rough economic times - certainly support that theory.

This Will Return clock made us laugh. And someone picked up a Mutsy Spider Stroller for $250. We think you got a good deal - it's a great stroller, as we wrote in our Mutsy Spider review, and it has been discontinued. But if anyone else is still in the market, use this link - they're $180 through a third-party seller on Amazon compared with the $250 Amazon is charging direct. And there's free shipping either way.

If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?

One of the things we love most about publishing ZRecs is getting your reviews and observations on products in post comments. If you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We're compiling interesting comments for posts about user experiences with specific products, and may quote readers in ZRecs Guide listings in the future. Review the post above and, if you have any experience with any of the products we've discussed, let us know what you think of them! (If you're reading this post in your email or an RSS reader, click here to visit the post and comment.)

Like what you read on Z Recommends? You can have posts delivered for free every day via RSS or email, as well as occasional summaries of our links to other blogs, news articles, and websites from our Delicious feed (our alternative to published link roundups). If you're already a subscriber, please click through to this post if you like it - traffic to this post lets us know you'd like to see more content like this.