an Aventful experiment: the Drippy Cup
Written: Mar 21 '07 (Updated Mar 21 '07)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: durable even when thrown hard at the wall, keeps out sawdust
Cons: leaks, can't get it clean, ruins pop and beer
The Bottom Line: My final recommendation and why is this. I recommend you buy a sippy cup that doesn't leak and can be cleaned, because leaking and fermenting germs are negative.
|
|
|
| jkkelley's Full Review: Avent 7 Ounce Magic Trainer With Handle |
Some people are blessed with a good deal of natural grace and dexterity. Others simply know not to pile great heaps of crap on end tables, work areas and by their computers. Others remain sober at all times.
The rest of us spill our beverages.
I'm kind of a fanatic about not spilling things, but I'm not good at actually avoiding it. My wife is even worse about it, always in danger of knocking over a 128-oz. Gargantuan Big Gulp of a syrupy soda pop. And since I'm a freak about having sticky anything on anything, I decided to try a pilot project. We don't have children, and we are too old to have used sippy cups (when we were toddlers, we just threw the half-empty glass at our moms like the gods intended), but I have read a number of reviews of them on Epinions. Intrigued, I began to wonder if they would help me overcome the hitches in my liquid getalong. My wife did not react with a lot of enthusiasm.
Me: "Dear, I'm going to get some sippy cups."
Wife: "Why the hell do you want sippy cups?"
Me: "To drink from." I thought most people should know that.
Wife: "You're a weird man." She thinks most people should know that, too.
I selected the Avent Naturally Magic Trainer Cups (two-pack), new with the easy clean spout and handles. They look sort of like little orange plastic trophies turned upside down, or maybe small garbage disposal units like you have under your sink, the kind down which some well-meaning guest always drops a spoon and you discover it later when the disposal sounds like D-Day, or a fight in a machine shop.
Packaging: I have to criticize this. The two-pack was wrapped in plastic like the kind used to hold six-packs, but tough enough to make crude barbed wire out of it if you wished. It was somewhat hard to cut the packaging off using a normal scissors. I used a fish-cleaning knife to cut the second one loose; much better. Then again, my knives are kept sharp enough most of the time to shave my arm slick in one pass. Be free, little sippy cups!
Assembly: each cup consists of a little bottle shaped like a large baby food jar. On top of that you slip the handle thing. Then you screw on the lid, which has a little nipple with three little holes on it (about the size of ballpoint pen tips), not unlike a woman's if her nipples are pretty swollen; except that if any woman's nipples are flattened like this I feel badly for her. Maybe she should have the baby (or husband, or ironworker she met in a honky-tonk) wear a mouthguard. The nipple thing is white, so you should be able to recognize it easily when you get thirsty. There's a clear plastic cap you can put over the whole top, and that too has little holes.
Exterior: the cups are graduated in ml (cc's) and ounces, so you can measure the exact amount you want to drink. This is an excellent feature with certain liquids because it enables you to know just how much you've consumed. For example, if you accidentally poisoned yourself and the ER people wanted to know how much you drank, you could tell them. They are graduated up to 5 fl. oz. or 140 cc's, very handy for certain purposes.
Experimentation: I tried it in a number of applications and torture tests relevant to my regular activities. Here are the results:
Iced tea: this first attempt was mixed. I could easily see the level of the tea in the sippy cup, but that may be due to the darkness of the liquid. This should really be called a sucky cup because you have to suck pretty good to get anything out of it (good training for some professions and pastimes). The plastic didn't seem to affect the flavour of the tea, which is good because I'm very fussy. I knocked it over on the counter and it didn't spill, but that may be due to my only filling it with 5 oz. of tea. I even turned it upside down over the sink and nothing came out. A little was left in the bottom, which went to waste. No good, as I loathe all wastefulness and am the leftover king.
Diet Cola: I had this with a nice salmon dinner, genuine Alaskan wild-caught salmon my niece brought with her to visit us. The salmon was great, but the sippy cup was a major pain in the butt as far as Cola went. I sucked really hard on the nipple thing and the Cola fizzed up like champagne afterward, as though someone had shaken the bottle like Bob & Doug MacKenzie playing The Beerhunter. It made the Cola taste pretty unpleasant--good thing I only had to suck out five ounces of that stuff! Cleaning up afterward was a bigger pain than the tea because it was hard to get underneath the valve and get the nipple nozzles cleared. I cannot recommend this sippy cup for diet cola.
My Sippy Cup runneth over: next (long after the salmon, mind you) I decided it would be nice to have a glass of wine while watching the Amazing Race (where Uchenner and Joyce just barely kept it real in Mozambique). I broke out a nice 2003 Meridian Cabernet Sauvignon I'd been saving for some time, measured out 5 oz. and gave a dainty suck on the nipple. Very oaky, not overly dry, a tannic finish with nuances of lavender and parsley.
Unfortunately, this caused some Cabernet Sauvignon to leak out the little airhole opposite the nipple, and before I knew it I had dark red wine on a perfectly good wife-beater. Good luck getting that out. It didn't leak as much later in the glassful, but I still don't think sippy cups should leak just because you drink from them. I actually had to spread a paper towel on my chest like a bib, which I found somewhat embarrassing. The necessary suction did nothing at all for the ability to appreciate the wine. The Avent is probably Not Recommended for wine enthusiasts with discerning palates. Maybe for people who drink Mad Dog 20/20 it would be all right, because they aren't worried about staining their wife-beaters and probably can't afford a new one very often anyway.
Beer: I didn't have high hopes for this after the Diet Cola experiment, but I felt a duty to try anyway. First I had some Widmer Hefeweizen (the champagne of wheat beers) with a dinner of burritos, and that was the most unpalatable 5 oz. of beer I ever drank with the exception of Rhinelander and Meister Brau in college. At least this one did not cause a vomitus, but it completely ruined the beer. It was like trying to drink beer and getting nothing but the head.
Since I was afraid the Widmer wouldn't be a big hit, I also bought some Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale and let it warm up to room temperature. British beer is supposed to be flat and warm, so perhaps flat warm beer would work better in a sippy cup. Unfortunately, the ale wasn't flat, so it was like the Widmer but with dark foam as opposed to light amber. I cannot recommend this sippy cup for beer drinking. Maybe if you let the beer sit around opened at room temperature for a few hours most of the CO2 would escape.
Motor vehicle: I also wanted to see how this affected my ability to manipulate the gearshift and steering wheel of my truck, which could be important as I have a manual transmission and must shift often, meaning putting the beer down in a big hurry. This sippy cup did not fit well in a car's cup holder due to the handles, so it didn't really ease the difficulty of going from drinking to shifting gears in a hurry. It would be easier with a normal beer can, as most people do.
Rum: I felt hard liquor would be among the most promising tests because it isn't carbonated, and we already saw how poorly that worked out. I loaded up 5 oz. of Barcardi Dark Rem and sat down for soem reading and ahving of a few drinks. that's when I found out that this could asl9o be called the Drippy Cup or maybe the Slopy Cup because whenyou sucked on the nipple device rum came leakging out the airhole. I didnt' notice it at the tieme until I felt my hands a little weat and realized i had stickey rum all over my fingers. You can't tell jsut how big a mess youve made with this until the mess is made, which ahs to count as a striek against it.
I wantesd to see if the cup would work well when imbibighn while using pawo9er tools such as tabel saws and the drill, so I saved a cabinet door projest for when I did this stest. i ahve to praise the cups for keeping sawdusth ajnd genareal workshop crap otu of my Baracardi, and for makign it safer because there is no way i could suck dowtn the rum fast enough to become intosixcated, because I know for cetain that if I did soem of it woudl jsut coem out the top and be wasted (rather like myserlf i must admit when i went into the hHouse to write the is part of my revewi.) Plus in the woodshipo you don't reaally care if you have rum on your fingers because you get somuch other stusff on them and they are usually oily ro filthysomehow.
Agfter this i went to bed because otherwiase I might sstill be crocked when the woemna came home and doing that is a sure death setynetnce espeaically wyen one of them is your neece. We have so set teh exampel for eth youths of ASmerica.
Washing: the next day, after I'd had some coffee and aspirin, I was eager to see how easily the cup washed in the dishwasher. I didn't see any way the valve area could get cleaned, so when I went to bed the previous night I had just left the cup laying around with rum all over it (path of least resistance). Plus, my wife and her friend and my niece would soon be home, and if my wife came home to a buttload of dirty dishes and evidence of drinking, she just might shove this sippy cup up my rear. I don't think it would fit very comfortably. (I apologize for not testing it in this application.) So I ran it through the dishwasher just as it was, disassembling only the parts meant to be disassembled.
The result was highly unfavourable. I pulled the freshly washed nipple thing (to which the valve is permanently attached), lifted the valve and sniffed. Rum. So normal dishwashing won't clean this thing; you have to manually wash it while lifting the valve as you run it under the water. Otherwise whatever you were drinking is going to ferment underneath there, which is bad enough if it's water; but if it was fish broth or beer or something, it would get very smelly and become a biology experiment. Definitely do not give your child rum or beer in this sippy cup unless you like cleaning it with great care.
Infantile temper fit: since men who can still get hardons are well known for sudden, puerile bursts of rage, I felt I must subject the cup to one of these in order to evaluate it fully. (I mean subject it to a sudden burst of puerile rage, not to a hardon. Really, some of you need to go rip off a chunk.) For authenticity, I waited until I hit my fingers with a hammer by mistake while working on a project, and took out my fury on the inanimate sippy cup. I grabbed that sucker and threw a hard slider right at the garage wall. In this vital area, the sippy cup stood up like a trouper. I mean, I let fly with that thing, and it didn't break nor bend nor spill.
Overall: I had hoped this cup would solve my spilling problems, but it failed in two ways. It tended to dribble out the airhole, and it was a headache to clean. It's durable, but that isn't saying much, as a galvanized bucket is also durable. I don't claim to be an expert on sippy cups but there has to be something better than this out there.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
jkkelley
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Location: Ana-Tolia
Reviews written: 79
Trusted by: 308 members
About Me:
Farewell, Mr. Grover.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.