Munchkin 40041 Mighty Grip Trainer Cup, 8-Ounce, 2-Pack (Colors May Vary)

Be Very Careful- Choking Hazard! While these sippy cups were one of the only ones my daughter would use (she nursed exclusively and I was never able to get her to take to a bottle), she choked on the entire end of the nipple. I'm so thankful I took an infant first aid class as I was able to get her to expel it but I was never more frightened. I always check the ends of the sippys before giving them to her so there was no prior damage to the end. She was literally sitting in her high chair eating and must have just bit down really hard on the end and that was all it took. Please be careful if you use these sippy cups- I personally don't think they should be on the market since they are used at an age when children are teething/biting and it clearly doesn't take much to bite right through the end.

After damaging the spouts from vigorous cleanings with a bottle brush I realized the key to keeping this otherwise perfectly designed sippy cup from the trashcan is just to be gentle when you're cleaning it. Only use a soft sponge and do not force it too far up against the top of the spout. The spout works by having three slits in the silicon and if one of those fragile pieces tears, you will have leaks. Additionally, because there is no valve, if your child is accustomed to biting the spouts this design will cause more liquid to flow more easily which can be annoying to them or something fun to play with instead of drinking. For my daughter this was not an issue and she loves the soft feel of the top. They quickly became her favorite. I just wish they sold the soft tops separately so I could replace the ones I've damaged. Such is the cycle of production and consumption I suppose.

I'm trying to transition my 6 month old, toothless son off of bottles onto sippy cups. I've gotten the ones with the totally solid sippy spout and he refuses to use them. I saw these and purchased two of them on a whim for $2 each, hoping that he'd find it easy to hold as holding his bottle is still a challenge for him, but he can hold things with handles just fine, and hoping that the soft spout would ease his transition.

Well, he did really take to it initially... He was able to hold it, he even took watered down apple juice (a previously hated drink), and asked for it by both trying to reach for it and self-drink with it and by using his word previously used for his bottle. I thought it was a smashing success, but I saw he was positively SOAKED using this cup. I thought maybe he was dribbling it out of his mouth, but watching him use it I saw it leaked very substantially in multiple places... It leaked out the "one way valve" when he tipped it too far, it leaked out of the seams when he tried to drink, and it leaked in a solid stream out of the area where you screw the lid in.

Obviously, my first thought was I put it together wrong, so I tightened the lid which mostly stopped that leak, and I lined up the bumps on the rubbery portion of the lid as was suggested. That did stop the leak mostly (it went from a steady stream of huge drops to just a little trickle), until my son dropped it. Then it leaked again and required me to fix it, again. I figured maybe with constant supervision it'd be OK, so I just kept fixing it and giving it back. However, my son started getting super frustrated with it. He wanted it, would pull it to his mouth, but he acted like he does when the nipple on his bottle was clogged. Sure enough, when I took it back and gave it a squeeze, the amount of juice he got out of it was actually less than what he'd get from his "slow" bottles. Figuring the cup was already a disaster and had nothing to realy lose, I widened the hole a bit. The amount of juice he was getting was far more reasonable and less frustrating for him, but then I noticed the new issue that if he gummed it at all, the rubber portion of the lid would pop out of place and it'd leak again.

Being the glutton for punishment I am, I tried the second cup thinking perhaps there was some sort of leak or seal problem on the first cup, making it defective. If that's the case, then the second cup has it too because the results were exactly the same. Sticky, soaked, screaming baby who got almost none through the spout when he tried to drink. He really did at first seem to take to it, but by this point his clothes were dripping wet and he was frustrated at getting too little to drink and the constant taking it away to fix it so any point in training that this cup would have provided was totally gone.

I'm going to try and return them or contact the company for replacements... I've bought Munchkin stuff before and have always been happy with the quality I got for the price. But these cups... Honestly, the cups that I bought at the dollar store were a lot more functional than these cups were and if he'd have taken to the hard spout, I would have relied on those over these any day. A little leaking I can understand and tolerate, but this was liquid pouring out of all areas like there was nothing there at all. Such a bummer because he really took to it and if it had worked even remotely as it should have, I'd have run out and bought 10 more.