I love opening the mailbox. Especially when I see a package. The bigger the package the better. And please send it to me without me knowing about it, or somehow have me magically forget about it.

These arrived at our sunny Florida house yesterday and I couldn’t have been more excited to see them! I forgot to include the two smaller packages that each had 2 replacement spouts for Munchkin’s “standard” sippy cups.

I love Munchkin. Always have. I love them because gck-1 loves them. She will only drink out of this brand of sippy cup. Well, at the house anyway.

Sippy cup shopping is just as much of a pain in the butt as bottle shopping was when she first arrived. You have no idea what kind they’ll like and take to until you’ve already bought every single brand imaginable.

Luckily we only bought a couple other brands of sippy cups before we found a winner so too much money wasn’t completely wasted. Plus I sold the other sippy cups at our rummage sale so it all worked out pretty good.

Let me tell you what didn’t work out so good. The spouts that came with the sippy cups. At one time we had right around 13, yes, thirteen, sippy cups. Some big some little, but only about 6 of them had spouts that still worked. The issue that I found gck-1 had was that she liked to put her finger in the spout… which made a gigantic hole and made the “spill proof” cup completely spill-able. So I just threw out the spout and lid and kept the cups thinking that I would wash the spouts and lids that worked and just change them out with the remaining cups. That was crap. I ended up just throwing out the useless cups and keeping the working ones.

I bought a couple new cups to replace the ones that were now completely missing and noticed that Munchkin had improved upon their design of their standard spout. Instead of having three straight slits where juice can come out and tiny fingers can go in, they upgraded to 2 x’s as the slits and a nice thick divider in between. Good job Munchkin! You might have stopped this destroyer of a child after all! Turns out… that wonderful divider was not so wonderful and not so thick. And these new “spill proof” cups have gone back to being spill-able.

I’m smarter than gck-1 so I figured I’d outsmart her and buy even more new sippy cups… with straws. Put your finger in that and ruin it! She couldn’t. Score one for me! Sorta.

I’d strategically use the cups that have straws for daycare. This way if her lunchbox were to ever tip over, the juice would stay in the cups.

So I thought.

The great brand new cups that have straws in them, leak. As in all the contents will be out of the cup and into your childs lunch box before noon kinda of leak. Not a happy mommy or baby anymore.  The cup was creating some sort of crazy vacuum and it would gush out of the straw.

So I did the only thing I knew to do. I wrote Munchkin and complained. It wasn’t so much of a complaint as much as I really wanted answers. I buy sippy cups in the 2-pack and that’s about $5.99 for 2. I have 8 cups sitting in our cabinets. That’s $24 right there. And let’s not forget about all the other cups that I had to throw out. I’ve probably thrown out about 10 cups. That’s an additional $30, if we’re still assuming that I bought them all in the 2-packs. Sometimes I didn’t, and those cost $3.99 for 1. Either way… I was kinda irritated that I was spending so much on something that claimed to work magic! So I explained to them what the problem was and they told me that I needed to squeeze the straw in a certain place about 4 or 5 times before using it to make sure the leak wouldn’t happen. (Guess they should’ve included that in their instructions somewhere!) I tried that and it didn’t work. I re-wrote them. They told me to take pictures. I did. and video. They told me to include my name and address with the pictures. I did. And they replaced every single straw sippy cup and sent replacement spouts for the others!

Thank you Munchkin helpers! That sounded bad. I meant to just say thank you ;)

I love Munchkin. gck-1 loves Munchkin. I would still recommend their products to anyone that asks even after my little sippy cup issue.

They always provide the best customer service. I’ve dealt with them once before with our bottle warmer.

If you have an issue with a product, don’t be afraid to speak up. Who knows, you could be revealing an issue that they didn’t even know they had. And believe me, they want the feedback. How else will they know their product is effective and works?!

Thanks again Munchkin!

 

Tags: munchkin, munchkin sippy cups, sippy cups

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 and is filed under the fam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.