Gearhead Mom

SIGG Is Still Irritating Me

I think it’s a bit tacky that SIGG didn’t offer up their exchange program until AFTER the CEO got slammed for his initial volley to the public about the BPA liners. Way to try to save yourself there. Not.

Z Recs_Safety On Twitter

Are you following Z Recs_Safety on Twitter? If you want to have all the up to the minute links, commentary, and insights on the state of child safety in the U.S, then giddyup on over there and follow ‘em. Hooray for Z Recs, as always. Love them.

SIGG BPA Confession

I just read a very well-written (as usual) piece over at ZRecommends on SIGG’s confession that oh yeah, we did use BPA in our water bottles. Check it out here.

Punchie Punch, Munchie Mug

Move over Snack Trap, there’s a new spill resistant infant and toddler snacking cup that is both BPA and phthalate-free and manufactured in the good old United States of America; Sonoma, California to be specific in town. Invented by a grandfather of six and manufactured by a machine he built, the Munchie Mug is committed to child safety and parent convenience.

The Munchie Mug when dropped or turned upside down does not spill any little snacking treasures inside out onto the carpet, couch, backseat of the car, grocery store floor, etc. It is made of 100% recyclable polypropylene #5 and all FDA food-grade approved materials. The Munchie Mug is dishwasher safe and baby safe. The soft fabric enclosure overlaps to keep snacks in, and it is soft enough to not irritate little hands trying to get snacks out.

OK. Sounds good, right? But let’s get down to brass tacks - did my girl like it?

It DOES Have BPA In It! Did We Forget to Mention That?

I got an email over the weekend from The Soft Landing (one of my favorite BPA-free shopping sites). Apparently they were selling some Sassy products that Sassy had claimed were BPA-free, only to find out that, ha, just kidding, they do have BPA in them. The Soft Landing has worked out an agreement with Sassy to accept responsibility for their mistake and refund customers. Way to go Soft Landing!

Per the Soft Landing, The following products, made by Sassy, do contain BPA:

Extra Gentle Soft Tip Spoon - BPA in spoon handle
EZ Grip Feeding Bowl and Color Change Spoon - BPA in spoon
Snack Time Infa-Trainer Cup - BPA in cap over straw
Flexi Grip Toddler Fork and Spoon
Color Change Fork and Spoon

The Soft Landing has pictures of the products on their site to help identify the products lost in the sea of sippy cups in your cupboards.

BPA-Free Teether Gift Set

My friend Lisa’s second daughter just about goes nuts for her little BPA-less giraffe teether. We often see them on walks, her daughter in the stroller gumming away happily on her giraffe. She got it over at the Soft Landing, a fantastic site committed to BPA, PVC and pthalate-free shopping and blogging. They focus on healthier feeding and teething options for kiddos.

The Soft Landing has cool BPA-free sampler sets for bottles, sippy cups, stainless steel drinking devices, teethers and feeding sets. Everything seems to be on sale right now, too! Good ideas for shower gifts! I know when Sy was wee and couldn’t breast feed for the first few months, I tried every bottle out there. A sampler would have been a great thing to bust out.

Make sure you check out their blog, too. They have an incredible amount of information on safer plastics.

I Go, You Go, Foogo

Just checking in from the ongoing struggle to find a good, safe sippy cup. I recently ditched our old favorite, the SIGG, because of the “aluminum just might cause dementia” argument and opted for all stainless or BPA free products. (Sidenote: my friend Laurie, a fastidious cleaner, found mold in her son’s SIGG the other day. Eeeyuw!)

Sy’s favorite on-the-go water bottle is the Foogo Straw Bottle by Thermos. Way back in 2007, Thermos launched their kid’s line, Foogo. I think it was a smart move. A lot of people trust the line and have good memories of their products from childhood. Turns out it’s safe, too. Bonus.

Amazon’s Launches Not Exactly BPA-Free ” BPA-Free” Online Store

I read this report over on Z Recs.

“Amazon.com quietly launched a “BPA-Free Baby” shop on its site last month, with a promo box appearing in rotation on the landing page of its Baby section. Z Recommends has cross-checked listings from Amazon.com’s new shop against the Z Report on BPA, and confirmed with representatives at the relevant companies that four of the fourteen models of plastic bottles and sippy cups sold as “BPA-free” by Amazon.com in their new shop contain bisphenol-A.”

Way to boost consumer confidence in you, Amazon! Z Recs is pushing Amazon to take responsibility.
Click on over to Z Recs to read the full report. As usual, Jennifer and Jeremiah have done our BPA homework for us.

Toys R Us to Bid Farewell to BPA Feeding Products

Wow. Toys R Us has decided to phase out all feeding products containing BPA by year’s end. Check out the article.

You can also read more on the FAQ section of the Toys R Us site, questions 21 through 26. 

Excellent news!

Canada Moves to Ban BPA In Baby Bottles

Happy Monday!

Check this out - The Canadian government announced Friday that Canada will be the first country to ban plastic baby bottles made with bisphenol A after concluding the chemical is toxic. See full article here.

Z Recs Helps You Shop BPA-Free

Check this out! One of my favorite blogs, Z Recs, has just launched a supremely cool text messaging service to help you shop for BPA-free products. So basically if you are at a store and you can’t remember which products are BPA-free, all you have to do is send them a text message query about a particular company (details on their site) and you’ll get a message back detailing which products offered by that company are BPA-free. Way to go, Jeremiah and Jennifer. That is just too cool.

Snack Trap

Here’s the most brilliant travel snack trap out there, the Snack Trap. An ingenious little snack cup with a flexible lid that junior can pick snacks out of without flinging them everywhere. It’s not perfect, the lid can be pulled off, the snacks can be shaken out, but it’s all about chaos management. It took Sy a little while to figure out how to extract the snacks, but once she got the hang of it, she was ultra-proud of herself.

Boiling Water Increases BPA Leaching

I was just reading a recent post by Jeremiah over at Z Recs about BPA migration rates. “Adding boiling water to polycarbonate plastic bottles causes a dramatic spike in the amount of bisphenol A, or BPA, leaching from containers into drinks, according to a U.S. research team.” I had some of the same questions about the article that were in the comments, i.e. - Who adds boiling water to infant formula? Is there still a higher leaching rate after you’ve sterilized the bottles?

Z Recs also has a great post on BPA found in infant formula.

You can also read the piece on ohdeedoh about not drinking hot tap water due to concentrated amounts of lead.

The Land of Sippy Cups

Like diapers, I feel like we’ve tried all the sippy cups there are to try. I currently have two in rotation, and yes, I have tried them all too.

1) Born Free Sippy Cups
BPA-free and all that. This cup/bottle is easy to hold, has a removable handle and you can go from a bottle nipple to a sippy cup spout without changing the bottle on your kid, too. The flow is fast while using the hard spout attachment and it feels more like drinking out of a cup with a lid

There are six parts to the cup while cleaning which feels a bit excessive. I usually throw them all in a big bowl of hot soapy water at the end of the day and wash ‘em all up. I put them in the dishwasher once a week for an extra clean since they are dishwasher safe. I’ve noticed that the soft spout tends to break down pretty quickly. I even had to throw one away as bits of the rubber were breaking off and Sy handed me one straight out of her mouth. I did not worry because she does not swallow things unknown to her, but it might give me pause if she were younger. I now use the hard spouts only. They sell the nipples and spouts separately and all work with the same basic bottle.
9/29/07 update: I just had to throw away another spout because the opening basically disintegrated into a bigger hole and there were little bits hanging off. I am going to attempt contacting the manufacturer about this and see what their plans are for fixing the problem, I doubt I am the only one with this issue.

Snapshot for Born Free
• I love the idea behind it, to have a safe bottle for my kid, but how safe are the spouts?
• Not so cheap, but readily available both online and at Whole Foods.
• The bottles also come in glass.