The Infruition Kids Challenge

As much as we harp on about our range of fruit infusing water bottles – we’ve never really given any attention to our Infruition Kids bottle, so you may not have even come across them. (You by-passed them completely didn’t you?!). Well – they’re ickle versions of our Infruition Sports bottle, for the tiny hands of 4-5 year olds.

Admittedly – we don’t have any mums to young children in the team, so we sat blindly wondering if our proposition would excite kids (in our head’s – they are the best thing since Pokemon Go circa 1998) – and not be an inconvenience to parents who might opt to reach for fruit juice, because, well – you can buy them pre-made in bulk at the supermarket, and most of them come with free straws... (FREE straws – did you every appreciate that before?!)

So we invited Sam Wills of MouseMooMeToo.com fame to do the honours of a review. A blogger & real life mummy with 2 little daughters > ‘Mouse’ & ‘Moo’ – to take part in what I shall refer to as ‘The Infruition Kids Challenge’. The aim was to simply observe whether Mother & Daughter (Mouse, not Moo – who, as Sam says ‘is fresh out of the womb’ – so her hands are probably a little too tiny for this) could use our fruit infusing bottles with ease, and mainly if Mouse got excited….

“For Mother’s Day, Mouse’s pre-school staff “interviewed” all the children about their mummies. The transcript of which was then edited for highlights and sharpie-markered into a card, with a lovely, indiscernible drawing on the front. Mouse’s card included these greats:

Q: Mummy’s real name? A: Mummy.
Q: Mummy’s job? A: Being a mummy.
Q: Mummy’s favourite food? A: Peas and sweetcorn. (Well, she’s not wrong, I do LIKE a good serving of P&S but if pressed my favourite food is probably bread. All the bread.)
Q: Mummy’s favourite drink? (Oh Christ…) A: Water. 

I lol’d heartily at this and made a few badly received jokes about sticking to clear spirits before 5pm, but actually she’s not far off. I’ve always got a bottle of water on the go and I have a little rotation system in my fridge of a day bottle, a night bottle and a gym bottle. I do enjoy a system. Plus, bottles mean I know how much I’ve drunk, rather than trying to remember how many half glasses I’ve downed standing at the kitchen sink.

When we’re out, Mouse and I usually share a bottle, but to be honest I’m getting a tad fed up with her simultaneously monopolising it, and contaminating the contents with her backwash. So, our new bottles sent to us from Infruition are perfecto. They’re the ones with a plastic chamber suspended inside, which you can fill with fruit, veg, herbs etc to infuse the water with loveliness. Mouse has the Kids version, and I have the Mini version so I can shove them both in the changing bag. Both have a capacity of 450ml, and Mouse’s bottle has a really sweet design that made her feel very esteemed because “your bottle is all plain, mummy. Mine has sunglasses on!”

Admittedly, when I first thought about infusing water, lemon was pretty much as imaginative as I got. Perhaps a slice of cucumber at a push. But each bottle comes with a code so that you can access a 28-day recipe plan online. Recipes? For water? Surely not. Dear reader, there are sodding loads of them. Each one details out a rough cost per bottle and gives you some nice wellbeing stats on the ingredients. Basically anything that resembles an alcoholic beverage and is potent enough to hide the lack of booze is good with me – so I went for a Mousejito (yes. I’m totally calling it that) for my first infruiton, slightly modified from a Mojito recipe up on the site.

Mousejito Ingredients

• ½ lime cut into small wedges
• Juice of 1 whole lime
• 10 mint leaves, crushed (well, rubbed about and ripped a bit)
• Drizzle of honey (healthier than brown sugar….ahem…)
• Ice cubes (if you’re lucky enough to have an ice crushing machine on your freezer then I WANT TO LIVE IN YOUR HOUSE!)

You could actually make this alcoholic, if you wanted to, by adding some rum and tonic water rather than straight “normal” water. But, as my outing was pre-watershed, I stuck to the virgin version. 

“Mouse, bless her, is suffering this week with that most god-awful affliction, the summer cold. Not only is she sweating profusely about the gills because it’s 30 degrees, but her eyes are red-rimmed and she’s up half the night sneezing and coughing. She’s been a bit miserable, which in turn makes me miserable because I have to put up with her. So, for her infruition, I suggested that we whip up a magic medicine to make her feel a bit more zingy, also helpfully making use of what I had in the fridge.

Mousetonic Ingredients

• 6 Blackberries, slightly ‘bruised’ from enthusiastic toddler fingers
• 10 blueberries
• A small thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped (mummy sized thumb)
• 5 mint leaves, again a little worse for wear from exuberant picking
  Ice cubes (to turn this into a “frozen drink” which Mouse thinks is the don of the drink world)

A small tip for you, don’t goad your child into eating raw ginger because you think it might be funny. We had to halt proceedings for a while until the burning sensation stopped.

Et voila – two very healthy drinks bottles, ready to go. Generally, anything with a citrus infusion can be topped up with water and last pretty much all day. Berries tend to have a shorter infruition-y shelf life and need to be refreshed every 3-4 refills. Don’t waste the fruit though – eat it!

I love these bottles. They don’t leak, the colours are snazzy and they’re made from BPA-free triton plastic. They do a larger version of my mini, as well as a sports version with a grippy handle.”

So – that’s that. The proof is in the review. When I caught up with Sam after this challenge, she also mentioned that she purposefully did not use any citrus fruits in Mouse’s drink due to the damage it could cause to baby teeth. That was a snippet of genius that made me feel she really adapted what could be done with our bottles – for the audience that are kids. So, watch this space as I think Sam is likely to make another appearance. Dot. Dot. Dot.

By Geet. (and the wonderfulness of Sam.)

About Sam (The ‘Me Too’ of MouseMooMeToo.com)

*These recipes were developed by Sam who writes over at "Mouse, Moo and Me Too", a very honest blog about raising two "lively" daughters and spinning a full dinner service of plates!