The Chicago Children's Museum is taking DIY fort-building to the next level with the best kids' immersive exhibit we've heard of in a long time:

Everyday materials take on entirely new shapes and purposes to become a fort designer's dream. Leaning doors and headboards provide the perfect pre-made structures to begin your design. Cabinets without backs, upside-down coffee tables and a balcony with stairs also provide the perfect starting place. After you've staked out where to begin, use the endless supply of blankets, sheets, tablecloths, stools, brooms, and more to expand your space. Be on the lookout for windows, mirrors, table legs, and other items to use, too!

Now that you've built the perfect fort, now it's time to play in it! Make a sign to hang on the door using one of the moveable chalkboards to let visitors know who is inside. Dress up in a costume, make music, play games, or invite a friend and favorite doll over for tea. Will your fort be a house, a store, or a castle? How about a rocket ship? The possibilities are endless, but fun is guaranteed! [Link]

We learned about the exhibit from its project manager, Rick Garmon, a month or so ago when he contacted us to ask for permission to use a photo of one of Z's forts in a brochure he was developing to accompany the exhibit. For those of you seeking fort-building materials, the fort image he selected (we've uploaded the full PDF here for free download) combines pieces from the now-retired-and-replaced-with-various-unattractive-spinoffs Cranium Super Fort, a Fortamajig, and a play easel, which makes a nice tall wall and an excellent baby nook to boot. The entire thing could have been built using blankets and sheets, although those Fortamajig connectors are very handy.

They have a video intro to the museum on YouTube that is making me feel pretty sad that we weren't able to make it to this museum during our whirlwind weekend in Chicago during BlogHer. We took Z with us but relied on the conference's much-appreciated (and very well-run) daycare service. Here's what the museum has to offer - the standard equipment you'll see at most children's museums, but also some great big play structures:


Z and I hung out memorably after hours, and late into the evening, while Jenni attended most of the sociable BlogHer events. (Z is amazingly fun after bedtime - she gets goofy, not crabby.) My availability from about 4 p.m. on made a visit to the museum (located on the Navy Pier that was served as our primary playtime stomping grounds) pretty much impossible - the only day they're open past five is Thursdays.

If you're in the Chicago area this fall, do your child a favor and check out this exhibit together! We won't be in town to experience it, but if Z's behavior yesterday is any indication, we'll be building copious blanket and couch forts at home in the exhibit's honor.

And we'll be sure to upload photos of some of them to the infamous Couch Fort Confidential Flickr pool, which has some pretty smashing stuff on it already:



If you and/or your kids build a fort, post it to the pool, or write about it on your own blog and send us a link! We'd love to see it.

Here are some items - a dollhouse, a play mat, an unusual building set, three feeding lines, and a plastic package - we noticed at the 2009 ABC Kids' Expo, the annual baby/kids' product exhibition we attended last week in Las Vegas. We'll be reviewing the feeding items below when they're available, but the other items here won't be reviewed on Z Recommends simply because of their price-to-testability ratio. Events like ABC can allow us the in-person viewing and limited hands-on use necessary to favorably promote some high-priced items we'd otherwise feel obligated to request a sample of before recommending.

Hape's Bamboo Sunshine Dollhouse got our attention with its novelty iPod Touch dock - look, a solar-powered video player so your kids' dolls can be couch potatoes! - but kept it with the bamboo construction and furniture design. This dollhouse has been available in a non-iPod version for almost a year and the solar panel typically powers lights throughout the house. Here's a slideshow that shows off some of this dollhouse's nice lines and thoughtful furniture:



The $500 price tag makes us sad, but in this case, it's hard to argue with.

We loved these shapeshifting, tesselated play mats made of EVA foam. One made of flowers can be used to make a table that can be inset into the mat, and another transforms from an animal-themed play mat into a rocking horse, with bonus chicken and turtle figures for head-scratching variety. Here's a slideshow of some photos we took:



The mats have been garnering blog mentions over the past year, but this show appears to mark their introduction to U.S. markets. Depending on how successful this importer was in getting orders at the show, you may see them showing up at your local brick-and-mortar toy retailer soon - or online - for about $130 a set.

Here's a short video we shot that shows how the pieces work:


We saw several new feeding items we will be reviewing soon. This slideshow shows just a sampling of them.



Items pictured in the slide show above are, in order of appearance:

• Dr. Brown's new sippy cup that is so different from its Big-Gulp-like Training Cup it retains the name only because the former model has been summarily retired. Look for it in the next few months. (The Dr. Brown's rep also told us they had now officially retired their polycarbonate bottles.)


• Kid Basix's new stainless steel bottles, which feature a silicone sleeve and a nice solution to the problem of an opaque feeding bottle: Formula-mixing measurements on the cap.


• A new-to-the-U.S. feeding line from Beaba (maker of the Babycook baby food maker) that includes utensils, plates, bowls, cups, and a feeding set we're especially interested in. We're looking forward to reviewing that stuff as soon as it comes in, for reasons we'll explain when we get a chance to use and evaluate it.


• Environmentally-friendlier packaging: The My Plate-Mate now sports PET bagging (rather than PVC) and minimal cardboard compared to the box-and-window style of most feeding gear. We saw a lot of greened-up packaging at this year's expo, and more companies than we could count making explicit note of it in their product pitches, which means consumer demands are being heard. We like how My Plate-Mate managed to improve their packaging footprint while still offering an eye-catching and attractive design to help sell their product.


• New stainless steel baby bottles from Klean Kanteen, as well as a very long awaited one-piece sippy lid (they've been using Avent lids for years now). Can't wait to try these out - although they won't be available for a few months.

Last but not least, Sprig Toys had several new items we'll be reviewing and talking soon, including this interesting building set that combines cardboard and Sprigwood (recycled plastic and sawdust) for a lean, lightweight building set.


The teasers above are just a fraction of the great products we discovered at the ABC Kids' Expo this year. There are far more we're saving as surprises for readers after we receive samples and test products in our home. If you like the service we're providing, please make sure to subscribe to our blog feed via email or RSS and consider doing some of your Amazon shopping through ZRecs links!

A week ago we highlighted one of our favorite recent toys, Playmobil's Bunnies Treehouse set, as the first in a series of three posts about great toys from Playmobil we've run across recently.

We may have been living under a rock not to know about Playmobil's toy sets for toddlers, but the Playmobil 123 line is a happy discovery for our five-year-old.



The riding toy has a little notch the figures can sit on.


Play pieces like the bench and slide have plastic outlines that match a grid of nubbins on the base so they can be attached Lego-style.



Playmobil 123 play sets run from $8 to $18 on Amazon.com. The Playground play set costs $14; the Meadow play set is another nice one at this price point.

Playmobil toys are made of ABS plastic, and are free of BPA, phthalates, and PVC.

The Playmobil 123 set above, which was sent to us by Playmobil's U.S. distributor for evaluation, will be donated to a needy family in accordance with our Keep No Stuff reviewing policy.

Boon unveiled several new feeding products at the trade show, including baby bottles and a straw cup and a great-looking dish drainer that plays on artificial grass. Here's a close-up demo of the straw cup:


Born Free refused to let us film their prototype, but it's too late for that. Born Free and OXO each have identically-functioning cups that will be coming out around the same time - each of them featuring a twist ring that releases the straw, which is held against the inner rim when it is closed, rather than pinched midway between the center and edge, as the last two popular straw cup design saw similar widespread adoption a few years ago by Thermos, Nurture Pure, etc., and the flip-top (Munchkin, Playtex) did before that. Design comes in waves across this industry.

Here's a bowl I guess we missed - it's available now. Its lozenge shape echoes rounded corners we're seeing in new designs across the market. Such corners give babies and multitasking caregivers more scoopability when trying to get food out of a bowl - a feature pioneered by another company we'll write up soon. Anyway, Boon's bowl:



But Boon also has a bizarre web-like bowl holder in development that sort of turns the stay-put bowl idea on its head. "Wrap" actually encapsulates a bowl of your own in a thermoplastic elastomer webbing that has a suction base and wraps around the bowl lip too. The idea is that it helps keep the bowl affixed to a surface (these things are always great for high chairs, terrible for tables - porous surfaces don't take to suction cups well) but if it fails, the wrap protects the bowl if it is dropped, thrown, etc. We're looking forward to testing this one out when it comes into production.


We saw another clever reworking of the stay-put bowl concept from a new-to-America company that we've been waiting to reach our shores. We'll have a demo of that up soon.

And here's the Grass dish drainer, which is just plain clever. We'll test it too, to see how it works.


Boon also has some new bath stuff, also in prototype stage, that we'll show off soon. One strange item I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet, and one that looks very interesting.

We were surprised to show up at the ABC Kids Expo booth of the container, kitchen, and housewares company OXO to find a wall of prototypes of children's feeding items they'll be launching in early 2010. OXO's line features some interesting plates and bowls, a straw cup that's hard to evaluate in the prototype stage, and a trainer cup that slows the flow of liquids while offering kids the responsiveness to tilt that "real drinking" from a cup entails. If that last part sounds a little confusing, just watch this video, which we shot to show off the full line (remember, these are prototypes, which explains the poorly-fitting straw):


OXO warned us several times that these products wouldn't be available for several months. We told them you didn't care. What we should have said was that seeing stuff in the prototype stage is, at least for some ZRecs readers, the ultimate experience we're all really after.

Props to OXO for developing a line of cups that uses entirely interchangeable parts. For startups this is a long-range design issue to plan for from the outset, and one that ensures their products have resonance for retailers looking to invest in a brand that can sell to parents at multiple developmental stages. For a company like OXO that cut its teeth on relatively unrelated product categories (we love their Candela night lights), among other things) it's a chance to come out of the gate with a product that makes sense for consumers at a time when putting their own stamp on reinterpretation might take precedence and create a lot of one-off designs. It's a sign of this company's discipline and practical design background that they chose to prioritize both.

It's unclear to us whether these products will have parts sold independently, to allow consumers to upgrade existing cup bodies with later-stage lids, but it's also unclear whether the price point will really make that necessary. The main point is, you can have a bin of cups with parts that work together so that you don't have to play a matching game to build a cup for your child's drink - if, of course, you invest heavily in OXO product. It's the same product line compatibility we've praised Playtex for in the past, and we're happy to see it gaining more traction.

Needless to say, we'll be putting most of this line through the paces when it's available in January or so.

We met with Rick Dias, Chief Operating Officer at Thermos, who walked us through new changes to the Foogo and Funtainer line. The focus of our conversation was on the changes they have made to the composition of the plastic base and lid in response to reporting by bloggers and feedback from consumers that some Foogo and Funtainer lids were cracking and bases were splitting or detaching from the bottom of the cup.

Thermos launched the Foogo line with one type of plastic, and later changed it to a plastic that had a higher heat tolerance but proved more brittle and prone to breakage when dropped. This meant broken lids for some users and bases that came detached from the stainless steel body for others, which posed an additional laceration hazard with sharp metal welds were exposed.

Adrienne Jones of Baby Toolkit did excellent reporting on this issue, and we picked up the story in February 2008.

Dias cited blogger commentary as the leading cause of their decision to change the plastic again, to a mixture that is a bit more pliable but is not quite as heat tolerant. Here's an interview we did with him yesterday at the ABC Kids' Expo, where he walked us through the changes as well as showing off Thermos' new Phases line of Tritan plastic sippy and straw cups.

Here's our discussion of the changes to the line, and the engineering decisions behind it:



Thermos' Funtainer was denied a ZRecs Top Pick rating in our 2009 BPA-Free Sippy and Straw Cup Showdown, largely based on this outstanding issue and the company's insistence that there was nothing wrong with the product line. Readers, however, awarded it Top Pick Status in our Reader Rescue Poll. The fact that many voters may have been evaluating different versions of the product - either the first version or the second one, and thus making their recommendation on products with a significant variation in long-term performance, makes the often unannounced product tweaking companies do a bit of a challenge for the reviewing process.

We're looking forward to reviewing the entire new product line, and have some features we're particularly optimistic about. More on that - and on how to make sure you get the new version when you purchase a Foogo or Funtainer - when we get the products shipped from Thermos after the show.