I played with LEGOs all through my '80s childhood, and loved them so much that they were the only set of toys I kept for a future child. I can't say I've championed all of the changes the brand has gone through in that time - most of the lines they invest most in now are merchandising tie-ins with specialized parts that integrate less fully with a big tub of LEGO bricks - but the company never lost my faith, in part by developing an amazing website where you can actually buy any combination of individual bricks you like (a practice we've taken up for a couple of special projects we'll write about soon). Our daughter Zella has become a passionate LEGO user; just this morning, completely ignorant of the games that would arrive in the day's mail, she and I spent a solid two hours building a cafe with a second-floor studio apartment for a local wizard. In my experience, LEGOs are an easy way for fathers and daughters to enjoy long stretches of unstructured play together. In our case, she served up orders of flat orange pancakes from one of those semaphores that doubles as a frying pan while I perfected the hinged breakfast bar at the other side of the L-shaped demonstration kitchen. With LEGOs, pretend-play enthusiasts and tinkerers can play side by side, equally engaged.

When the company recently announced it would be introducing LEGO-based games to the U.S. market, we were thrilled but also a bit wary. The line that has been active in Europe for several years, but we had no idea what to expect from games made out of LEGOs, which sounded both fraught with possibility and like a gimmick of LEGO Star Wars proportions. [Dodges overripe fruit thrown by Lego Star Wars fans] But from the moment we opened the first LEGO game the company sent us at our request - LEGO's Race 3000 car racing game - we have been engrossed by LEGO toys in a whole new way.

First of all, to play most LEGO games, you have to build it. And everyone knows that children who build to LEGO instructions will have no problem shopping at IKEA later on. Homeschooling tie-in, check.


Race 3000 features truly brilliant little cars made primarily of LEGO pieces we'd seen before, which "float" above racing lanes on clear 1x discs.




The six-sided die, a custom brick with an integrated rubber housing, is built as you play; every player has seven colored chips that they can affix to the die as they move through the game. Rolling on your turn could trigger movement in any (or all) players, if their color comes up. Two other items on the die indicate turboing to a checkpoint or taking advantage of a shortcut if one is nearby. Oil slicks pepper the course and can slow you down, and strategic lane changes at the orange checkpoints are a key element of this game's strategy - you want to avoid oil slicks, inside curves are shorter than outside curves, and cars in front of you can help you leapfrog further forward, opportunities and hazards that may combine or conflict as players move through the race.


But one of the most interesting things about this game is that the track is completely reconfigurable. In fact, the course shown at the top of this post is not the one provided in the instructions (it also includes an extra piece of grass and some flowers from Z's other LEGOs) but one we made after playing the "standard" game. The standard board setup is below.


Needless to say, this makes the game likely to remain pretty interesting to kids, who can customize distances between checkpoints, the frequency and drama of shortcuts, and the twists and turns in the track. The rules even offer suggestions for rule changes that can be introduced for "advanced" play; given the fact that the entire board is a built environment, and that many kids will have other LEGOs around that might make their way into play, this game could be the spark that sets the next generation's game designers' minds in motion.

We have been playing another LEGO game the company also sent us, but will reserve judgement as we've only played in two-player mode, and think it might work best with three or four. But this game, we love. The only downside to a game made of LEGOs is that it includes very small parts - those flat little squares for the dice are less than a centimeter long - and families unused to LEGOs might find this a challenge. LEGO seemed to anticipate this in providing extra die markers in each color. But we also learned an amazing fact (amazing to us anyway): that the little wrenches you get with any mechanic-themed LEGO set have a chisel-shaped tip to help humans pop legos apart! I played with LEGOs for 10 years as a child and never knew that.

The bottom line question about this product is, is it something for non-LEGO families? We say yes. The game is enjoyable to play and does not even revolve around building things, but building things as a part of setting up the game (for the first time, mind you; once you've built the board and pieces they all fit nicely in the box, largely intact) adds a new dimension to the game that has value of its own. For about $20, this LEGO game offers more than most games pitched to ages 6-8, and its malleable nature makes it an invitation to beginning game-making to boot.

A couple of weeks ago we posted a link to a hugely informative and potentially lifesaving blog post we found in our everyday scouring of the entire internet for useful child safety information. (OK, that's an exaggeration, but we do get around.) This particular post was about the fact that a person who is drowning does not flail their arms around and splash and scream. They slip under the water, resurface, and slip back under. Struggling is in fact pre-drowning behavior, which may or may not occur, but the fact that actually not getting enough air in the lungs prevents you from doing all of the things that get people saved in movies has tremendous consequences for our behavior. It also goes a long way to explaining how children so often drown in pools when their parents are home, or in bathtubs when their parents are feet or even inches away. Well-written, accurate, and surprising, the post was just the kind of news and information we try to highlight in the regular links we send to ZRecs feed and email subscribers. The post has received over 500 comments to date and its publication bookended a pair of truly tragic infant drownings within weeks of its appearance, and the author has since followed up with a post about mitigating home pool hazards.

Reader Lindsey replied to our posting of the link with a story of her own:

This struck a chord with me since my son had a near drowning incident in March during a swimming class, with 4 instructors in the pool with him. They all had their attention directed away from him while he was struggling in water that was 4 feet deep - just a little too deep for him to touch. He was only a couple of feet from the edge but couldn't make it there. I was watching from the balcony, where parents are required to sit during lessons, and saw the whole thing. Fortunately, one of the instructors turned around and noticed him in time. Like this article says, he didn't make a sound, but he was traumatized by the event and afterward was asking me if people die when their feet can't touch the bottom of the pool. Very scary!

Please, parents, watch your children closely around pools or any accessible water play area, do not assume that pool covers or fences will prevent a child from gaining access, and never leave an infant or young toddler unattended in the bathtub. And if you aren't yet a subscriber to our blog - which will not only get you access to stories we find like the one above, but also keep you abreast of our blogging on the rare occasions that we temporarily go dark, as we have over the past two weeks (we missed you!) please feel free to do sign up. We offer a full, not excerpted, feed of posts and links in RSS or email format, and our email digests arrive once each day content is published, packaged up with whatever links to outside content we've found that day.

We've completed our writeup of our Pampers Dry Max skin irritant testing and published a final report you can read online, download, print out, or share with others. We'll summarize a bit here, but the full ten-page report is useful for anyone who has cared about this issue, for anyone who cares about others who have been affected by it, and for anyone who thinks this whole issue is a media or corporate conspiracy. Read our study for yourself and see what you think.

• Measurement of Relative Skin Irritation of Pampers Dry Max Disposable Diapers

From the report:

We believe the most significant finding of our study is its demonstration that, when compared with a leading competitor or its own previous formulation, Pampers with Dry Max are more likely to cause extended irritation persisting long after the diaper is changed. Examining the behavior of this rash when the skin is repeatedly re-covered with another diaper which is then soiled or wetted on top of the persistent rash, was beyond the scope of this study; but it does not feel excessively speculative to posit that a rash so treated would be more likely to deteriorate further than skin that showed no signs of being compromised.

A more troubling finding, and a highly illuminating one, is that beyond this overall difference in performance, Dry Max Pampers from two different "batches" were associated with different levels of both initial and extended irritation. These differences were documented both by a blinded "scent test" and by their tracking codes. The batch linked to all cases of extended irritation, and which triggered the sole reaction to a urine-containing diaper in this study, was the batch that had been acquired from a consumer whose own child had suffered from severe diaper rash while wearing diapers from the same package.

Of all the people with whom we will ultimately come knocking to share our findings directly, we are most interested in sharing it with Procter & Gamble. We're interested in an ongoing dialogue with them and will be offering them the chance to follow up on our findings with some specific information that might shed further light on our testing and on their Dry Max diapers.

Read the study here, judge our methods and our analysis for yourself, and pass it on.

Thanks to all of those who sent or offered to send diapers for us to test, for those who read and commented on our draft versions of this study, and most of all to the readers who contributed financially to make this study happen.

Note: We're leaving comments off on this post because this report involved not only a lot of work but some personal sacrifice, and we'd like it to allow it to stand alone on our pages for consumers to access and come to their own conclusions about. That said, if you feel this report is meaningful or scurrilous, we encourage you to discuss, excerpt, reprint, distribute, analyze, and praise or pan on your own blog, with the lovers and haters on Babycenter, or anywhere else you see fit. If you talk about it on a blog, rest assured that we do read what other bloggers say about what we do, and we're sure your readers would enjoy the discussion as well. We are also always accessible to anyone upfront about their identity, and can be reached at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com with your questions, comments, and criticisms.

Don't know what this is about? Here's more ZRecs reporting on Pampers Dry Max than you can shake a stick at.

We've received some great questions on yesterday's PlanetBox review.

Jennifer writes:

I was wondering how this would work with keeping food cold. My daughter has a nut allergy. So we send lunches everyday to school. Most days, she likes to take some kind of meat that would need to be kept cold.

Thanks in advance for your feedback on this.

Jennifer, we aren't experts on safe meat temperatures, but I can tell you two things: The PlanetBox case is insulated, and also has enough room in it that we were able to slide a 1/2" thick plastic ice pack inside to go under the lunch box. If you were particularly concerned about having the cold pack directly on one of the areas, you could affix it to the inside of the insulated case, and all the cooling mojo would be going straight to the section you had the meat in.

From My Boaz's Ruth:

I’ve looked at Planetboxes before but so far, I can’t justify $35 for it.

The magnets concern me. If it is in their backpack along with a CD or a DVD, etc, will the magnet affect the information on the other?

Nope. DVDs and CD are optical media, and aren't affected by magnets. I do remember that issue, though, from the days of cassettes and videotape! (Insert nostalgia for radio-recorded mix tape here.) The one thing that would be sketchy would be having this in a bag where it came in close contact with a computer, but hey, we wouldn't recommend doing that with a lunch box anyway.

Mariah wrote:

Looks great… I just wish there was an option for hot food. We regularly send leftovers in a Thermos - soups, pasta, etc. Those wouldn’t work well in this box. Maybe we could also make a fabric envelope that includes a pocket for an add-on thermos (I don’t think it would fit in the pocket of the PlanetBox carrier that’s designed for a water bottle.)

That would be cool. If you do make one, send us a photo. We'd love to see it.

And finally, from Julie:

For our son's lunch "main course" we usually send him to school with dinner leftovers, which typically consist of a green veggie, meat, and rice or quinoa. He very rarely gets a sandwhich. I'm concerned that the rice or other side with small pieces won’t stay in the appropriate compartment. Have you tried it with something like rice or a small grain? Thanks!

Here's a video I shot this morning to show how the PlanetBox contains larger food in its four sections:



But that didn't address your question directly, so I also pulled a jar of grain out of the fridge (rye was on hand) and filled up a compartment to check.



Looks like a win!

We love well-designed, environmentally-conscious lunch boxes that use reusable containers to encourage parents to offer kids a variety of foods in reasonable portions. We've added more than a dozen options, many of them very good, to the ZRecs Guide since its launch in late 2008, but the products that got us really, really excited in the ten years since Laptop Lunches set the standard have been few and far between. Today we get to talk about one of them.

The PlanetBox is a molded stainless steel lunch tray with a hinged lid, with top and bottom halves meeting to form tall open compartments. Its otherwise institutional look and solid build are offset by magnet sets used to decorate the box. PlanetBox sells a variety of combinations of products at different price points (all of them high, so get ready) but, wisely, they do not sell PlanetBoxes without decorative magnets. For our daughter, the magnets are a crucial element.

Let's go on a tour.


You can buy a PlanetBox with or without a carrying case and a set of two (only one pictured here) "wet containers." More about those in a minute. First, let's look at the main event: the lunch tray.


This magnet set is the least exciting of the seven themes they currently offer; we'll show you a more exciting one in a minute.


This clasp works really well, at least when the PlanetBox is contained in the optional storage sleeve. I'm not sure we'd trust it to stay closed in a backpack without a case of some kind.


These indentations are what give the clasp its grip.


Here's what Z took to summer science camp today. Note the size of the "main" compartment - it's a bit small, and although it could accommodate a standard square piece of bread (the smallest loaf shape you'll find these days)




The cherry tomatoes are homegrown - and so are the pickles! We grew the cukes in our garden and made four quarts of refrigerator pickles this year.




This nice little spot in the PlanetBox is designed for something sweet - a square of chocolate, small cookie, or other treat. We love the suggested portion - we regularly offer Z desserts this small, and she loves them. In this case, we went a bit savory with a few newly-dried cherry tomatoes from our garden - a luxury item she's sure to appreciate, as they taste like candy!


A kids' Clif bar and string cheese.


Here's the second set of magnets we promised to show off. One thing we like about this and several other magnet sets PlanetBox offers is that the shapes form a larger whole, sort of like a puzzle with big gaps in it. It makes a nice design and kids (Z at least) think it's pretty fun to put together and show off.




The lunch tray in its optional (but recommended) case.


The two "sidecar" containers you can buy with your PlanetBox (or separately) looked like an afterthought but proved invaluable. Like most other divided tray lunchbox designs, the PlanetBox is not designed for seriously wet foods. Wet fruit and pickles caused no problems for Z's lunch, but we wouldn't put yogurt, soup, or anything else very wet in there; the sections simply don't seal perfectly from each other or from the outside world. The separate containers are a different story, and fit in a pouch in the carrying case or can be used inside the PlanetBox itself, where the closed tray will hold the containers shut.


This container (and a smaller one we failed to get in this picture) have silicone rings in their lids that help them seal nicely (a rubber band is recommended to hold it shut) and are removable for cleaning.

So... the price. We have a lot of difficult conversations here in cases where quality comes at a price, but aren't afraid to call out overpriced products that don't deliver on value. In the case of PlanetBox, we're firm supporters despite a relatively high cost of entry.

A basic set - PlanetBox and magnets alone - will set you back $35. Add the two additional containers and you're up to $50 - an awkward surge upward, as the two containers don't feel like $15 more in product. Add a carrying bag and you're looking at $60. Yep. Sixty dollars for a lunch kit. Parents cross thresholds of price every day as they move towards safer and more durable products and away from stuff designed to be lost, disrespected, or thrown away when the next new product marches by. But are parents ready to cross a $60 threshold for a kids' lunch box kit?

For us, the answer is not (just) academic. One of the nice side effects of our no-swag policy is that unlike many product reviewers, we don't have to approach the question of "is it worth the money" on a theoretical basis; if we want to keep a product that has been sent to us for review, we force ourselves to buy it, donating a comparable amount to charity. And although more than 9 out of 10 products we evaluate for review pass through our home in a month or two and never look back, we really can't let this lunch kit slip through our fingers, so we'll be paying up.

That said, I'm pretty sure we don't have $60 in our budget for a lunch box. We will probably forgo the separate storage containers, buying the PlanetBox a la carte for $35. You could add a carry bag for $15, and it wouldn't be a bad buy - it fits the PlanetBox well and includes an extra pocket on the outside for a small drink container. I think I'll vote for us to skip the carry bag and have Jenni make Z her own awesome fabric sleeve for it. Then we'll use a small Lock & Lock container or other small-form plastic container instead of PlanetBox's stainless steel ones, and save ourselves that $15 as well. We'd recommend a sleeve or container of some kind to ensure it stays closed and protect it from dings. But it isn't that hard to sew a fabric envelope... Jenni made herself a pretty awesome Kindle holder we've been meaning to show you, and I'm sure she could do something nice for Z's new PlanetBox.

We're naming the PlanetBox a ZRecs Top Pick for its use of sustainable and safer materials, its overall design, and its incorporation of fun into what could otherwise have been a very institutional-feeling product.

You can buy the PlanetBox and its accessories at the PlanetBox website.

Monday is the deadline to nominate yourself or someone you know (or both) for a Bloganthropy award, a way of recognizing bloggers who have used social media to promote a good cause.

As members of Bloganthropy's advisory board, we encourage you to go nominate any and all bloggers you feel deserve recognition for their use of social media to promote worthwhile causes, whether advocacy-oriented or charitable in nature. All bloggers are eligible, so if you read a blog you feel has made a difference (or tried hard to) using social media (including blogging) to spread the word about issues of importance to you, head on over and nominate them.

For what it's worth, we're eligible for the award too - the selection of the final recipients of the award is made by the head honchos at Bloganthropy in collaboration with folks at Bloganthropy's partner, Childs' Play PR, without consultation or information-sharing with Bloganthropy advisory board members.