Jump to:
ZRecs Home |
Z Recommends |
PRIZEY |
The Tranquil Parent |
Punnybop |
The ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products
Get Z Recommends posts and links delivered free via -
-
As seen in
You Bought It: What ZRecs readers recommend with their purchases, and a request for product feedback
By Jeremiah | August 13, 2009 | 21 comments / Join the conversation!
The high level of consumer expertise and inquisitiveness is one of our favorite things about regular ZRecs readers, and we've been reading into the Amazon purchases you make through our sites for a while now as a partial guide to what baby gear, sippy cups, kids' toys and books, and BPA-free water bottles you're thinking about, investing in, and willing to take a chance on. We realized recently that if we are able to learn so much from how our readers vote with their dollars, you could too - and we could learn more by asking you what you thought of these items now that you've tried them out.
That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.
In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"
For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.
More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.
Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.
Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:
All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls.
What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?
By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.
For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.
A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.
This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.
It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.
If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!
We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.
Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?
Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.
Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?
Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?
Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?
ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?
We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.
A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?
Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it.
We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.
Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.
A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.
You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.
As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?
Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?
Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.
Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.
ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.
One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (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, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.
That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.
In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"
For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.
Sippy Cups, Straw Cups, and Adult Water Bottles
More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.
Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.
Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:
- Tilty: 28 two-packs, or 56 cups, at $2.50-$5 per cup
- Innate MeMe: 22 sippys at $17 per cup
- Thermos Foogo Sippy Cup: 10 sippys at $16-$17 per cup
- Thermos Foogo Straw Cup: 7 straw cups at $12-$18 per cup
- Thinkbaby: 14 sippys at $9 per cup
- Munchkin Mighty Grip Flip-Top Straw Cup: 12 (in singles or two-packs), at $4-$8 per cup
- KidBasix Safe Sippy: 8 sippys, at $13-$15 per cup
- Nalgene Grip-n-Gulp: 8 sippys, at $7-$11 per cup
All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls. What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?
By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.
For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.
A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.
This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.
Other Stuff You Bought The Most
It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!
We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.
The Most Expensive Stuff You Bought
Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?
Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?
ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?
Interesting Baby Gear, Toys, Books, and Music You Bought
We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.
A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?
Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it. We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.
Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.
A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.
You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.
Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.
If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?
One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (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, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.
Browse Z Recommends
-
recent posts
Improvisational Obstacle Course How to pose with two snakes Concerns raised over performance of Safety 1st harness adjuster Hands-on building and creativity toys from the 2010 Toy Fair Tyranny in the playroom The year’s best new easy-to-learn, fun-to-play children’s board games 2010 Toy Fair: Toy Fair goes green 2010: Year of the balance bike (and helicopter, and crane, and…) A portrait of the artist having her hair brushed by her mother BPA in toilet paper, fitting in exercise, a yoga game for kids: Links from the archives
- categories
- blog archive
- blogs we read
Looking for something?
Search
The ZRecs Guide
1316 products, 250 brands, and counting...
Get ZRecs’ monthly newsletter
Learn about our privacy policy
More good stuff
Advertisements
Advertisements
I had the Munchkins snack containers and REALLY disliked them. They were a desperation at Wal-mart. And before I’d used them one whole day, I realized they were not working so well. Even the mere effort of my son putting his hand in the container made more snacks fall out than he was even managing to keep in his hand! I probably should have returned them to Wal-mart, but I didn’t know any alternatives, so I continued to (try and) use them. Mostly, I just avoided.
And then one day I saw Snack traps in Toys R Us (cue the angels singing). They work! They actually do what they say they do. They hold up to multiple uses, being washed etc. And when they finally do get yellowed beyond singing, you can buy just the snack lid to replace on them! Then when you start having problems with ants in your kitchen, you can get lids to go OVER the snack lid at night to keep the ants from being attracted to the food inside the Snack Trap.
I purchased the Baby Bjorn Travel Crib 2 months ago online for under $200 - which I still thought was INSANE. Now I am converted.
This is our 3rd travel crib - we also have your standard Pack n Play and a Kidco Peapod. Our 1 year old doesn’t sleep AT ALL (as in, we came home from the Bahamas 2 days early because we hadn’t slept!) when we travel and I have tried everything in the book - even meditations, herbs, homeopathy, noise machines, attachment objects etc.
Exhausted and defeated, I gave in and bought the Bjorn crib. We’ve spent 4 different overnight trips in various unfamiliar locales and each time she has SLEPT THRU THE NIGHT PERFECTLY! Although I can’t give 100% credit to the crib, I am relieved that she finally sleeps well and that it’s comfortable. Plus, it’s fabulously compact when packed up - I can’t imagine bringing anything bigger on a plane. I will NEVER recommend any other travel crib than this from now on...it’s THAT awesome. Get it on sale :)
We bought the Tilty cups after reading about them here! They are wonderful, except for a few things. It seems as though anyone else who uses them can’t put the lid on properly… It’s pretty obvious how to do it, but they seem to put the two tabs together until I explain the correct way and show them how it fits. LOL I have one major complaint about Tilty, the drain holes when it is upside down. They are tiny and gunk in the dishwasher gets stuck in there and they fill up with gross water. Not all the time, but enough that it annoys me. We save water by scraping and loading dishes, then run rinse cycles in the dishwasher if it’s not full (our dishwasher uses very little water). I don’t like blowing in the drain holes to clear them out.. yuck. I wish they would stack, but oh well, they don’t take up too much space really. Otherwise the Tilty is great! My baby seems to really like them too.
I didn’t realize that the Munchie Mug is now available on Amazon. The price is a little higher on Amazon ($12.95 from the company’s site plus $3 shipping; $15.95 with free shipping on orders over $25 from Amazon).
We LOVE, love, love our two Munchie Mugs. My son uses them daily. They really do help contain messes and lessen the trail of Cheerios and snack crackers. It is one of my must-haves for the toddler years.
We have had ours at least a year and they are still great. I was afraid that the fabric would give out over time, but it has not.
We wash them by hand every one to three days depending on what snack had been in them.
The decoration is a little faded in spots, but again we’ve used them daily for over a year.
I really recommend this product. You can read my review here.
I guess I should update it and give it the accolades it deserves.
We bought two of the FLIP cameras. One works and one hasn’t worked since we opened the box. So, good news first, we LOVE the camera that works. It is light, easy, and fabulous. Bad news? We still haven’t gotten any responses from them many emails to FLIP about the camera that never worked. Any advice?
I bought the tilty cup but it was a no go for my bottle drinking daughter who refuses the sippy cup. When her dad is ready for the challenge, or all the nipples die, she will be back to this again.
I also have the snack trap and the munchkin version. i like the munchkin version. Wish I had 2 more. They are the best. I like them better than the snack trap bc it feels more sturdy.
Wow, so much to comment on!
First off, this is a great new feature, and I look forward to more of them.
Second, we love our Tilty cups, though we didn’t buy them through your Amazon shop (haven’t done that yet, but our next order will be through you...just didn’t realize you had this until now). Back to the Tilty--I find them easy to clean and my son is a pro at drinking from them. I like that they’re clear too, so you can see how much is left. Oh and the price! Awesome.
Love the Baby Bjorn plate set too, and as for Plan Toys, I adore their design and simplicity. We have one of the pounding ball things, which is great except that I wish the balls were corralled in the unit. They roll all over our hardwood floors when pounded through, which is frustrating for our toddler (and me, since I have to chase them down). He would probably play with it more if it caught the balls when used.
But this isn’t a Plan Toy rant. Just wanted to comment about how interesting this post is. Thanks!
I bought the Innate MeMe sippy cup thinking this was going to be the sippy of all sippys...sadly, I was mistaken.
I reviewed it on Amazon and have another reviewer there saying the same thing. Here is what I found after I spent nearly 20 bucks on a sippy cup. Never again.
This is an expensive cup and should be free of major flaws. Sadly it has the major flaw wherein the membranes fall out each time it is dropped or even jostled. This morning, I packed my child’s drink in the cup and sealed it in a zip lock baggie for our bike ride. After riding to the destination, with the cup placed in the child carrier, I found half the liquid in the baggie, membranes at the bottom of the cup...one big mess. It wasn’t even dropped! Even if your child never drops this cup and you never jostle it around, a curious child is bound to push on the air flow valve that peeks out of a hole on the top of the cup - any curious finger is strong enough to dislodge the valve and push it down into the bottom of the cup, making it a leaking machine. I bought this cup because I was looking for a quality cup that wouldn’t leak. What a disappointment.
Another design flaw of this cup is the handle on top. It is a double bar of sorts that loops up on the top of the cup at just the right width and angle that my child’s nose pushes though the middle of the handle, effectively pinching her nose closed while drinking.
There are better cups out there. Don’t waste your time or money on this one.
I bought both the Flip camera (it’s great) and the KidCo magnet locks (they’re not). The magnet locks worked great for about a month… and then the adhesive was no longer strong enough and they fell off. I tried re-attaching with glue but that didn’t work either as they were not *quite* in the right location anymore.
We still have the key as I think maybe we’ll try getting another set and using superglue or the like from the get-go.
Footnote: Actually, we bought the magnet locks about a year ago so we’re not in the stats you’re referring to.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to find your “Ten Favorite Kids’ Books” list. The link in this blog only takes you to the listing of The Important Book on Amazon, not your complete list. Can you help?
We have the munchkin snack cups and HATE THEM. I hate that they spill. I hate that they scare my 1 year old, (she thinks they’re too pokey).
I don’t much like the Snack Traps either. I think we’re just destined to have spilling snacks for awhile.
Thanks for all the feedback so far! A few responses:
My Boaz’s Ruth: We agree with you on the quality of the Snack Trap - the only one we think works better is the Munchie Mug. Both are designed and manufactured in the U.S. by parent entrepreneurs, so we don’t mind the higher price you pay over knockoffs like Munchkin’s, especially when they work so much better!
Suzanne: Couldn’t agree with you more on this product. The differences between the BabyBjorn and a Pack ‘n’ Play in portability, setup, and storage are like night and day.
Deanne, that’s an interesting issue to have had with the Tilty. They should enlarge those holes! (And, incidentally, a consumer could do the same with a drill if they were careful about it.)
Kate, given the low purchase price would a return be an option, rather than an attempt at a fix?
Kathleen, thanks for commenting and for letting us know you like the feature! Knowing that you’re a regular reader (and commenter) I will take that note about not knowing about our Amazon sales to heart. We’ll have gotten in the habit recently of adding footers to posts inviting some action on the part of the reader, which is sometimes a reminder of how doing Amazon shopping through our links helps us. But we’ll add something to the blog sidebar to spell that out rather than relying on notes in posts.
By the way, Kathleen, have you ever thought of setting a tray of some kind under the pounding ball thing? A cookie sheet, plastic serving tray, or file box lid might create a spillway that caught the balls before they rolled off into the land of required parental assistance.
Carrie, we’ve heard a lot of complaints both about that secondary air flow plug (though about it being hard to put in, not easy to push out) and the nose-pincher. That never posed a problem for Z throughout our testing, but we’re sorry if we led you astray!
Lila, thanks for the critique of the magnet locks. Good to know!
Shawn, so sorry for the bad link! Here is a link to our Ten Favorite Kids’ Books post. Feel free to comment with a recommendation or two of your own!
Jen, you really should try a Munchie Mug. Your daughter will love it, and it will not spill. At all!
I bought the Tilty cup after reading about it on this site and LOVE it. I’m thrilled it doesn’t have a valve, I like that it is clear, I like the cup-shaped shape of the spout, and I like that my daughter finishes her milk when she uses this cup.
On the other hand, I also bought the new Twist & Click Straw Sippy Cups by Playtex to add to the 2 older generation ones we already have. I was SO disappointed to see the straw is now connected to a valve!!! What’s the point of a valved straw? Isn’t it just as bad as a valved sippy? Harrumph. I bought 2 of those too.
We bought a Flip based on your review. I love it. It’s small and simple and the video is nice quality.
We own the Munchkin snack catchers as well. We never got to use them much. My very curious son made it his personal mission to figure out how it works and then to destroy it as soon as possible. It didn’t get a very fair trial in our house.:)
I recently bought a Sippigrip. It works just as advertised - it keeps the cup from going overboard. My only complaint is that my son managed to pull it off the cup and chew on it, and the black rubbery grippy stuff is very easily shredded by baby teeth. So now half the rubbery grippy stuff is gone, which, while not the end of the world, is still not ideal. Blessedly it is non-toxic. I don’t really want to buy another one of these cup tethers, but if I did, I’d probably examine more closely at the grippy stuff to make sure it’s not similarly easily torn. My son is an inveterate chewer.
We borrowed the older version of the Phil & Ted’s Traveller (then called the T2) when visiting friends this summer and LOVED the lightweight & compact aspects of it. Loved it so much I tried to buy one second hand and was tipped off to the fact that they are 50% off at Costco.com right now. At that price, it was a no-brainer for something that is sooo much more travel oriented than a Pack & Play.
That said, I find a Pack & Play faster to set up and *our* kid sleeps better in a Pack & Play. He’ll sleep well enough in the P&T;, though, and that’s sufficient when we need to conserve space in the car. And I hope it will have pretty good resale value in the end.
Why am I JUST finding this site? I love it!
As such, I’m likely not in the statistics you are using.
That said: I own an Avent Steam Sterilizer - also own the Avent Isis iQ pump, therefore (someone purchased this for us based on the pump model). Love it.
Also own a mini-processor from Hamilton Beach - make food for the bambino with this, as well as wicked hummus, chicken salad, and pesto for mumsy and dadders. My only whine about it is there is a vertical “lip” in four places on the bowl, and it can be a bugger to clean with the dishwasher as such. But really, if that’s it....I should just get some good gouda to go with that whine ;-)
Ava, can you elaborate on why the new design disappoints you?
Jen, not sure how this will strike you, but the way CPSIA enforcement is evolving, you may have a hard time selling it without major liability. More on that topic to come.
Monminator, welcome to ZRecs! And thanks to other commenters as well - great to hear those product assessments.
We LOVE the Kidco magnet locks. They’re the only child-resistant latches we’ve found that actually work, and we use them in the kitchen. The ones where you just reach in and push down on the bar to disengage were conquered by my oldest daughter when she was 15 months old. You actually don’t have to buy a key for them at all. Any magnet will open them (just don’t let the kids see you do this--I only use the key when they’re in the room).
The adhesive did wear off one of ours after about a year and a half of use. My parents had been visiting, and after they left I noticed one of the latches wasn’t working right. Upon further investigation, apparently it had come loose and one of them “fixed” it by putting it back on upside down. So I’m not sure if it came loose and fell off on its own, or if someone didn’t realize there was a latch on that cabinet and yanked it.
I love our Tilty cups, which we actually obtained as a review sample. I have since gotten rid of all valve cups and now we use only Tilty, the Nalgene Grip and Gulp (another review sample) and the Born Free sippy (freebie at BlogHer).
The Born Free has leaked once, but I think that was user error. I don’t like valve cups because we don’t have a dishwasher and they grow mold in the hard-to-clean valves.
Also I am teaching my kids to sit at the table to eat so I took away the “crutches”, if you will.
I have wanted to try the Baby Bjorn travel crib because of it being light weight. I abandoned the pack and play 2 years ago because of the bulk.
The SippiGrip was a godsend to me when my daughter was in the clumsy-dropsy stage. She didn’t throw her cup very often, but it was wonderful to attach her cup to her stroller so it wouldn’t fall out when we were walking on bumpy paths, or if we were traveling with an umbrella stroller with no cup holder. The velcro is strong, and the rubbery gripping material held any kind of sippy cup we used (Playtex, Avent or Klean Kanteen). We would occasionally use it to attach extra toys to her stroller, or her SweetPea MP3 player (wouldn’t want to lose that expensive toy!).
Personally, we like the Munchkin Snack Catcher. The top stays on much better than the Snack Trap, and I like that it holds more. Small crumbs leak out, but my daughter doesn’t shake it too often or try to take the top off, so that’s not a big deal for me. The Munchie Mug looks cool, but I haven’t seen it for sale in my city in Canada.