Sure, the idea of a light-up sippy cup may sound appealing to a child. But after reading the following cautionary tale, you might want to keep your kid far away from them for the rest of time. According to a mom from Boise, Idaho, her son's light-up sippy cup exploded in her face and landed her in the hospital.
As local Boise news outlet KTVB reported, a mom named Dzevada Becirovic was pouring milk in her 1-and-a-half-year-old son Kaysen's Nuby 360° Insulated Light-up Wonder Cup when the lithium ion battery exploded, and immediately impaired her breathing. "I was just standing right here, I grabbed milk out of the fridge — just regular milk, I went and poured it. Turned around to put the milk back, I turned around to grab the lid and I was about to put it on it and it blew," Becirovic told KTVB. "It was super scary. I immediately couldn't breathe — my lungs were on fire, my throat, I couldn’t stop coughing."
According to the cup's page on Nuby's website, the cup, which retails for about $8, is recommended for children ages 1 and up. Again, Kaysen is a 1-and-a-half-year-old; not to mention, Becirovic told KTVB she was using the cup properly. But still, no cup — whether it's designed for toddlers, pre-teens, or adults — should present any sort of exploding hazard.
After getting a friend to come over and watch her children, Becirovic went to the hospital to get checked out, she told KTVB. She said the doctor gave her a breathing treatment and a medication to relax her throat. When she went to a follow-up appointment a few days later, she said she was given another breathing treatment.
An attorney for Nuby's parent company Luv n' care, Ltd. told KTVB that all the company's cups are "thoroughly tested and inspected before hitting shelves," and the company asked Becirovic to mail in the cup in question so that employees can try to determine what went wrong.
"We are very sorry this incident occurred, but it did not happen due to any issue with our Light-up cup. The bottom line is the Nuby Light-up cup is safe and the only way for it to have exploded as the consumer claims is if it was cooked in a microwave oven," an attorney for Nuby tells Romper by email. "This is the only complaint of this type that we know about."
Dzevada also spoke with KUTV, another local news outlet, about the incident. "If it had been in [my son's] hands, I really don't even want to imagine what could have happened," she told KUTV.
The reason Dzevada is speaking out about what happened is so that she can prevent other parents from experiencing a similar situation. "It's not about money, it's not about a lawsuit," Dzevada told KUTV. " It's [about] getting the word out there, because Nuby isn't doing their part and obviously [this is] not a safe product."
For Gary Crowell, a Boise-based engineer, Dzevada's take wasn't quite enough to keep him away from light-up sippy cups. A few days after Dzevada shared her story, Crowell bought one of the cups for himself, filled it with water, and put it in the microwave as an experiment, KTVB reported. Wait... what?
As you can probably guess, Crowell's cup promptly exploded. And yes, he captured the cup exploding on video, and KTVB shared the clip.
An attorney for Nuby says, "The only way we have been able to recreate the event is to microwave the cup." So the company probably wouldn't be surprised to find out that Crowell's cup exploded.
I don't know why Crowell thought anything other than an explosion would happen, but hopefully the footage of his experiment is enough to convince caregivers to stick with old-fashioned, non-light-up sippy cups from now on, or, at least, to keep them out of the microwave.
Editor's note: This post has been updated with Luv n' care's comment.
