Health Canada has issued a recall of nearly 125,000 Nuby liquid-filled teethers - the Icy Bites Teether and Fun Pals Animal Teether - sold between May 2008 and May 2009, as well as over 7,000 Playgro "Toothy Teethers" (not sure those are even sold in the U.S.). The teether models involved in this recall are shown above, and we've noted the recall in the ZRecs Guide listings for each of these products, as well as adding a "viable bacteria" category of hazard for teether listings.

We have no word yet regarding whether this situation meets criteria established for a U.S. recall, but figured parents would want to know. The recall notice provides model numbers you should be able to check to see if teethers you own are part of the contaminated batch.

From Health Canada's recall notice:

Health Canada requires that infant teether fillings must not contain any living micro-organisms. Testing by Health Canada of these 3 teether products has revealed that the liquid filling of the teether is contaminated with the bacteria Bacillus licheniformis (in the case of the Playgro teether) or Bacillus cereus (in the case of the Nuby teethers). These bacteria generally do not cause illness. However, the bacteria can affect children with weakened immune systems, causing stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea, if the teether is punctured and the liquid from the teether is ingested.

In 2006 The First Years recalled six teether models in the U.S. that were contaminated with bacterial strains Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Pseudomonas putida.

For the ZRecs Guide, we will begin flagging teether models that have incidences of bacterial recalls and label these as having a "low" confidence level of posing the risk.

Anyone remember Tomy's Bumbling Boxing game? Sure you do.


Z and I are always on the lookout for used wind-up toys. Sometimes we crack them open like nuts to get their motors out, and sometimes we just repurpose and redecorate them.


This set, though, I flatly refused to let her touch.


We got it for fifty cents at a church rummage sale. along with a few other wind-ups we will most definitely be hacking.



If you ever see one of these, get it. The toy has more than just vintage charm - you can adjust the position of the forearms to deploy different strategies for defeating your opponent, and it's actually pretty fun (and funny, if Z's explosion of giggles and cheering at the close of each match are any indication).

I had the shadowy inkling there were more sets like this, with different themes. Sure enough, Tomy also made the fantastic-looking bowling game demonstrated below. The "falling pin" design just kills me.



Bumbling Boxing did inspire us, however, to create a pair of modified wind-ups we'll share here soon.

I started taking ballet when I was three years old, and didn't stop until I was forced to in my senior year of high school due to some unrelated health problems. It was my activity of choice through most of my childhood, and there were years I spent 15-20 hours a week in the studio, fueled by passion and family problems at home. I was one of the best students of ballet at a small-town studio that swapped out terms like "plié" and "tombé" for "bend and straighten" and "fall," with the big regional ballet companies close enough to occasionally see in action yet far enough away to make professional-grade instruction geographically prohibitive. There were girls whose mothers shuttled them four hours a day to the closest big city to attend class, who spent summers at dance camps and weekends at auditions. As much as I loved to dance, I was not one of those girls. But I learned a lot of invaluable lessons through it - lessons in grace, concentration, determination, and self-confidence, among other things.

Having gained so much personally from ballet, I always knew that when I had children, I'd give them the opportunity to try dance lessons. Since we lean away from traditional teacher-student arrangements, Jeremiah and I waited until a month ago, with Z nearly five, to introduce her to any sort of formal lessons aside from swimming, which she adores, and Kindermusic, which is pretty freeform in its preschool curriculum.

Last week, Z started a ballet "camp" at a local dance studio. Over the course of the camp, it will introduce her to some basic ballet concepts and channeling some of her highly expressive energy into creative movement.

I bought her tiny pink tights and her tiny black leotard, per the studio's uniform requirement, and the other day we went to pick out her ballet shoes. One of my strongest memories from early childhood is that time just before school starts in the fall when my own mother and I would go to Brown's Shoe Store to buy me new ballet shoes and new tap shoes. At that time, you had to buy your tap shoes early enough to allow time to drop them off at the cobbler's shop to get him to nail the taps on. Ballet shoes came without the elastics so I would anxiously await and watch while mom sewed the elastic onto my shoes - excited to put both pair on for a quick spin around the house before lessons started in the fall.

I had these memories in my head as Z and I headed towards Brown's. As we walked in the door I instantly recognized that shoe-store smell from my memory. But fortunately I hadn't told Z her why we were going to Brown's, because the times have changed! Brown's now sells MBTs and Earth shoes and has nary a dance shoe in sight. I was too embarrassed to ask why they didn't sell dance shoes anymore (for all I know they stopped selling them 20 years ago) so we pretended to look around a little bit and then left.

I later did some looking around online and found a pair that I wanted to get Z, so we headed to a dance store connected to a studio (as far as I know, the only dance store in town). Not only did the not have the ballet shoes that I wanted, but the ones that we ended up getting for Z came with the elastic already sewn on! I was so disappointed - I had looked forward to a night of digging out just the right color of pink thread and sewing on the elastic in just the right spot, taking care not to break through to the surface of the shoe. Even the tap shoes came with the taps already on. No more reusing the same taps from year to year - although every studio I've been in has a bin of old shoes that you can dig around in in case you forget yours or need another rehearsal pair.

I'm going to order some ballet bun holders from Etsy tonight. At least they still make those!

Z is really enjoying her dance camp and wants to continue taking lessons in the fall, but it's just one of the activities we're gently easing her into over the next year or two to see what she's interested in. Because I'm fully prepared to accept that while ballet was my passion, it might not be hers. Yes, I might be a little disappointed if she ends up hating dance, but what I really want is for her to gain what I got from dance - confidence, concentration, and determination. If that comes from another activity that becomes a passion for her, I'll be right there to support and encourage her in it.

Between September 2006 and August 2007, Mattel and its subsidiary Fisher-Price imported a combined estimated 2 million toys that violated U.S. limits for lead in children's toys. By the time we all realized that Mattel's unpunished idiocy showed that the state of regulations in children's products was completely broken, they had recalled more than 21 million toys and we were all thinking differently about the random plastic toys you find at your local toy store, whether or not they had a major brand name on them. Mattel's actions were the largest factor that finally triggered an overhaul and reinvigoration of the Consumer Product Safety Commission under the Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act, which went into effect this year.

Mattel and F-P have now agreed to pay $2.3 million for their lead-lined sins. (Error in post [missing decimal] corrected - thanks Kallie and Steph!) The companies still maintain they did not knowingly violate federal law. It's the largest such fine ever assessed against a toy company.

Z has been asking for assistance in a quest to draw portraits of people she is interested in, to supplement her daily quota of princess drawings.

Pee Wee's Playhouse is one of Z's favorite shows. We have several seasons, possibly all of them, on DVD.

Z drew the portrait of Pee-Wee above a few months ago, after rushing to find me during an episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and complaining that she couldn't pause the player at the right moment. She had assembled her drawing equipment (a cigar box full of markers and a stack of copy paper) and when I helped her track back to the pause position she wanted, she turned out a couple of studies, both with the odd, fanglike teeth shown above.

Rufus Wainwright is probably Z's favorite musician, thanks in part to me. We listen to his music a lot when I'm working on our desktop computer and she's coloring at her desk in our ZRecs home office, and she sings along with a lot of it. As adult as much of his music is, it seems to resonate with her as four-year-old girls often have a sense of doomed romanticism without understanding what "doomed" really means. I think they learn it from Disney films. Wainwright's cover photo for the 2003 album Want One also made a very big impression on her as she's very into princes and princesses. You can read a conversation Z and I had about him on Punnybop.


Z drew the portrait of him above about six months ago during one of our listening/singing sessions in our home office. She often has me print out coloring pages from the web for her to color, decorate, and cut out and she asked me to print out some pictures of "Woofus Wainwight" from the internet so she could draw him. In addition to coloring in teeth and adding makeup to the photos I printed out, she drew the above likeness. She was very proud of it, and I didn't ask her to explain the nose. The dense cluster of eyelashes is code, in Z's personal iconography, for her infatuation with him. Even princesses don't get that many lashes in her drawings.

I'm interested in the idea of putting together a book of portraits of celebrities by young children, but I'm not sure how common this behavior is. Do your children draw pictures of people they know about only through media exposure or as "fans", who aren't cartoon characters?

We've blogged about sales on the dead-simple, highly functional, curse-free line of Flip digital camcorders before, but we've never seen anything like this. The 30-minute Flip Ultra, which we use to shoot our video at ZRecs, is selling at the moment - and I'd stress the word moment - for an obscene $50, down from their pretty firm selling price of around $100 and their MSRP of ~$150.

Now, we know that they're clearing these out because more people want a 60-minute Flip than a 30-minute one (those ones are on sale for around $100), and the Mino is super-slim and thus takes up even less room in that pocket (those are on sale too, but not as much), and there's an HD edition out now, which uses a rechargeable lithium battery instead of AAs... don't blame these guys for being innovators.

But if you are in need of a cheap video camera to take on the go, do I even have to say it? This deal rocks. It was kind of hard to steady our hands as we pushed the "Add to Cart" button, but we did - and bought five Flips for some pretty rockin' upcoming ZRecs projects, and one for Z. (This is even cheaper than some really lousy digicams made specifically for kids.) If you wish to do such a thing, you'd better get your spouse involved, because there is a per-customer limit of three. At $50, I almost feel silly saying "we recommend this camera" - the price makes it kind of a no-brainer, from our perspective, unless you really have no need for a device like this.

The one concern we ever had about this camera, the quality of the included software for processing your videos (one of the innovations of the Flip is that it contains its own video editing software, so it works on any computer and doesn't require a desktop app), has been vastly improved - it now works very well and we sort, edit, and process videos like gangbusters. If you're looking for more input, check out the user reviews at the links above or read our review of the Flip Ultra in the ZRecs Archives, where we got a lot of techy reader comments, largely positive and now at least partially outdated.

So! Expect more video footage from Z herself soon, and some interesting news on how we plan to use our five new ZRecs Flip Ultras.