Product Review: Squeeze 'n Blow Pop-Up Bubbles

 When preparing the kids' Easter baskets, I was looking for small, fun (and cheap) outdoor toys. Since we go through a ton of bubble juice every year, bubbles are a no-brainer. While looking for something else entirely, I ran across a display of these:

At the sale price of 2/$5, this was a little more than I planned to spend - you can get a bottle of bubbles for $1 or less pretty much anywhere. But I was swayed by SpongeBob, which the boy loves, and the idea of no-spill bubbles. (They also had a pink Dora one for the little girl.)

The bubble wand pops up when the bottle is squeezed

 So, the idea here is a pretty good one: instead of having to stick your fingers in the bottle to try to pull out the bubble wand, the bubble wand is pushed up through a hole when you gently squeeze the bottle, already ready to blow. Stop squeezing, and the wand drops back down to reload. Repeat for more bubbles. Should be easy.

 Like I said, the idea is good; the execution, however...well, there were some problems.

• When I first opened it, no matter how gently I squeezed, when the wand popped up bubble juice spurted out with it, to run over the sides and down my hand and arm. This happened until the bottle was about half empty.
• The squeezing process churned the bubble juice into foam, making it very difficult to blow any bubbles. I probably only got bubbles once out of every four or five squeezes.
• You have to squeeze pretty hard to get the bubble wand up, and you have to maintain the pressure to keep it up while you blow - as soon as you let up, it slides back down. The age says three and up, but my six-year-old was not able to do this consistently. Granted, he doesn't have a lot of patience and he'd rather have me blowing the bubbles anyway, but after about five minutes, my hand and wrist were sore from the force required to keep squeezing this thing.

On the plus side, when we were able to blow bubbles, it blew a lot at once, and they were very pretty, iridescent bubbles. But overall, there is no way this was worth the money.