by Joyce Slaton posted in Products

This week at the JPMA Baby Show in Anaheim, the major get-together for baby-and-kid product manufacturers hosted by the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, there were hundreds of products made to cradle, entertain, bathe, and feed your baby. There were car seats. There were strollers. There were blankets, and shoes, and cribs, and nursing pillows.
And out of all of them, these 9 were voted the coolest, most useful, and most interesting. The 9 winners of the 2017 JPMA Innovation Awards (at which, full disclosure, I was a judge) are:

1. Stroller: Combi F2 AF + Joint - This is the product I came back to over and over again in a room full of stuff: lightweight umbrella strollers that can be hitched together to make a twin stroller, or -- important! -- disconnected at any time. Twin moms: How often are you out with your twins, strolling along, la da da dee, when one of them starts melting yet the other is fine" Yet even if you have another person with you, you have to drag the non-melting twin home, disrupting an outing. With innovation, you click, click, click, click, and the strollers are separate once more. Brilliant! (Combiusa, $250 for each F2 AF stroller, plus $70 for the joint bar)
2. Child Restraint: 4moms Self-Installing Car Seat - Installing a car seat is hard, and scary. You put this car seat in the right place in your car, turn it on via an app or a button on its side, and snap on two connectors. It does every oth...