Tag: Tryazon

Pura and Simple.

Published on by Darlene Dee11 Comments

*Sponsored post.*

YOU GUYS I FOUND SOME SWEET NEW WATER BOTTLES.

Well, ok, I found them in my mailbox after asking the nice people at Tryazon to hook me up with their Pura Stainless party pack. I said please. They said yes. Sweet!

(Skip to the bottom if you already love Pura Stainless and just want the discount code. It’s fine. I won’t be mad. Much.)

I invited over some friends and their kids and we painted rocks and talked about water bottles. We talked about other things, too, but water bottles are fascinating, y’all.

(I may have mentioned my obsession to find the perfect water bottle before. But maybe you don’t know that this obsession extends to Mama size bottles too.)

I love the earth, and I love drinking water, and I have a ToddlerMonster that will spill any water with no lid. So I need perfect water bottles at home on the couch, by my bed at night, AND on-the-go.

The perfect water bottle will keep my water cold. The perfect water bottle will not have a weird taste. The perfect water bottle will not spill if knocked over. The perfect water bottle for the ToddlerMonster will not spill even if it is banged around in my backpack. The perfect water bottle is easy to clean. And the perfect water bottle is good for my health and kind to the earth.

I have found an almost perfect water bottle.

YOU GUYS OMG!

Before I declare complete perfection, I do need to tote Babystar’s straw-spout bottle around in the backpack/diaper bag for a bit to see if it leaks all over everything. I don’t think it will — I turned it upside down and shook it VERY HARD. I will update this post later with my very scientific results.

The Pura Stainless bottles definitely keep my water cold. I have been using the larger size insulated bottle for a week, and my water is just as cold at 4am as it is when I set it on my bedside at 10pm. And it’s STILL COLD in the morning.

The spout is silicon, even though most of the bottle is stainless steel. Silicon tastes like nothing. PERFECT!

Results are out on the long-term spilling situation on both the mama bear and the baby bear size. The outlook is good but further testing is needed. I want to tell you about them NOW though, not in three months.

All parts of the Pura stainless bottles are (top-rack) dishwasher safe! But more importantly to me, there are not many parts and they all come COMPLETELY APART. So there is no question of whether that is mold in that plastic bit that I cannot dismantle.

There is literally ZERO PLASTIC. None. It’s really freaking cool. The bottles are stainless steel and silicon. That’s it. 100% recyclable and good for my family and the entire planet.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.

These bottles have a feature that I didn’t even know I wanted. But now I’m so mad that every company doesn’t do this. Every single component is compatible with the other. There are six sized bottles from 5oz to 28oz. There are five different types of tops: baby nipple, toddler sippy, straw top, capped drinking spout, and a silicon lid that closes the bottle completely to turn it into a storage bottle (which would be great for formula or those powder sports drink mixes). I can mix and match as much as I like. The thready bits are all the same size, so everything fits on everything.  I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

(Well, ok, the bottom part of the straw won’t reach the bottom of the larger bottles but I suspect there will be straw size options eventually. And you can technically still use the straw top on any size bottle but you have to tip it.)

I AM OFFICIALLY OBSESSED. Right now, I prefer this bottle to almost everything in my entire kitchen. Babystar is less impressed; she prefers her Unicorn Water but I think that’s only because there is a freaking unicorn on it. Toddler logic, y’all.

I gave away three of the five bottles that Pura Stainless sent via Tryazon because I AM SO NICE. I miss them. I kept the two that Babystar and I have been trying. Below is a size comparison, using my hand. Not a ruler because I am lazy. Those are the insulated bottles in 9oz and 22oz. I totally kept the insulated ones because I AM SO GREEDY. (Well, ok, I gave away one of the three insulated bottles they sent to me. See? NICE.)

Dear Pura Stainless, please make some sleeves with dinosaurs or unicorns or clever sayings (for the teenagers — and mostly me). Love, your latest social media stalker.

I wish I could have invited the whole internet to my rock painting party but I didn’t have that many rocks. I guess you could have brought your own. Whoops, my bad. But you can still use the party’s discount code for 20% off  through September 3: Pura22206.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

MAYDAY MAYDAY: Have you tried Pura Stainless bottles? Do you have a different favorite water bottle? Am I the only reusable-bottle-obsessed mama on the internet??

RAISING BABYSTAR: $20,963.61

 

 

 

 

Snacks, Pals, and SnackPals

Published on by Darlene Dee2 Comments

AKA That Time I Tried Tryazon.

Have you ever heard of Tryazon? The concept is pretty cool. You sign up and they email you ‘party opportunities’ which is code for ‘free stuff in exchange for free marketing.’ All well and good, fair is fair and all that jazz. When you see an email that interests you, you fill out a short application and Tryazon then chooses a certain amount of ‘party hosts’. (Usually 100 but I have seen less.) You get a box of goodies and have a party inviting your friends over to check out these goodies and then post about it on social media.*

If you check #tryazon over on my Twitter or IG, you will see some pictures of my party.

I invited about a million people, but the party day turned out to be the first 70+ degree day in our area in MONTHS (last Friday), so lots of mamas took their children outside to play instead. I don’t even blame them. I would have done the same thing. Don’t worry, I did take Babystar to a park before the sun set. I’m not a MONSTER.

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Before I knew that only a few (wonderful, stunningly gorgeous) friends would turn up, I went to Trader Joe’s that morning and spent $44.09 on fruit and cheeses and crackers and a few bottles of sparkly stuff to drink. Non-alcoholic because BOOOOOOORING but also because it was the middle of the afternoon and I have too much responsibility for day drinking these days. Which, quite frankly, sometimes very much sucks but here we are.

Oh wait, I ate a 0.19 banana while shopping so that’s actually $43.90.

Tryazon sent me plastic snack dispensers called SnackPals from a company called Wow Gear. They also sent a Wow Cup, a cool looking game to play from Madd Capp Games, and three different types of snacks to fill the dispensers (goldfish, gummis, and Cheerios).

 

Ok, so I signed up to do this to see if I was a ‘Brand Ambassador’ type of person. I am not. I am more of an ‘honest review’ type person. I never really learned that lesson about ‘if you can’t say anything nice, STFU.’ I think I will not be asked back. Whoops.

I WILL say that one mama LOVED the SnackPals dispenser. She went home with two of them — the unopened door prize and one of the demos. She said that her son refused to stick his hand into that other variety of snack containers. You know the kind I mean; there are several on the market but they all have a sort of plastic seal with a scary claw like opening that keeps the snacks from spilling out. We have the ubbi tweat container and Babystar digs it. (We had two and lost one and I don’t miss it enough to replace it. So there’s that.)

The point of the SnackPals container is portion control snacks for kids while on-the-go. Or while at home, too, I guess. You fill it with snacks (goldfish or gummis or m&ms if you are competing for favorite parent that day), turn it upside down, give it a solid shake or two, turn it right side up, then open the top to dispense a small portion of snacks. That totally happened when the adults experimented.

However, a three year old in attendance could not figure out how to work it or even open it. That is unfortunate because I kind of think three-year-olds are about the perfect target audience. The one year olds ignored it, even when they saw that there were snacks inside. The five year old shook and dispensed, shook and dispensed, over and over so there was no portion control aspect other that a parent saying hey that’s enough which we could do with literally any container.

The five year old quickly became the hero among the children there and wielded her power like a proper Snack Princess.

Because we were FULLY COMMITTED to this product review, we even checked to see if it fit in the stroller. It did not (we only checked the one already open and parked out front but dude).

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Also, it has no handles. Little fingers need handles. Mamas holding seventeen things need handles. If it’s not going to have handles, then it should at least fit in a stroller-sized cupholder. Right?

The Wow Cup sippy cup COULD NOT BE SPILLED. If all you are looking for in a cup is that it can not be spilled, look no further. But also, not a single one of the six children at the party could drink from it. (Yes, I washed it in between tries while wishing Tryazon had sent more than one for review. And to be fair, the four month old baby didn’t even try. Lazy baby.) Even I couldn’t get any water out. A couple of other ADULT WOMEN with brains could not get any water out. One of the mamas in attendance luckily had a similar sippy cup for her one year old and told us that we had to sort of squeeze/bite the sides to make it work. We did. It worked. But WHY would you want to teach your child to bite the lip of a cup?!? What about when they drink out of a glass made of ACTUAL GLASS?!? Seems dangerous to me. Hard pass.

(But then later that night I made my husband try it, you know, for research, and he drank with no problem and didn’t even understand my confusion. So, obviously, I need to replace our wine glasses with plastic and metal.)

We did not play the included game at the party. It looks really fun, and it will be played very soon at a child’s birthday party, and I think it will be perfect. It is labeled for players age six and up (which is why we didn’t play it and quite frankly why would you send that particular game along with snack dispensers and a sippy cup??) and it is for 3-13 players. I think the girls will have a blast playing at the party.

The party was fun. Parties are fun. But I would have rather spent $40 on a party on a day of MY choosing and not had the conversation center around baby products. Well, the conversation almost always gets around to baby products anyway because we mamas are #basic like that, and I guess it was kind of fun to have something new to experiment with, so I guess I might do it again but I am pretty sure I will not be asked to do it again.

RAISING BABYSTAR: $14,882.78

*Now the Tryazon web site has an option for something called ‘Tryabox’ where they ship you something to review and you don’t have to commit to a party and that sounds really cool. I like parties but again: $43.90. Which I know I did not HAVE to spend (and I definitely have leftover snacks) but what kind of host invites adult people to a party and offers them only Cheerios? Not me.