The search for a good sippy cup

If you have a toddler you may  just have the same cupboard I do. You know, the one full of sippy cups that just aren’t good enough, are broken, or leak. I dug out all the sippys we have ever tried, to review them for you and give you a head start on the search for the perfect sippy cup.

As baby turns one year old doctors recommend we stop giving baby a bottle and start using a cup. Using bottles (especially if you put baby to bed with one in hand) can cause tooth decay. It leaves milk sitting in babies mouth. The milk contains sugars that bacteria love to grow in and creates a nice environment for tooth decay.

Anyways…. to aid in this sometimes stressful transition from bottle to cup, the sippy cup was created! Yes, they are sooooo much better than the sippy I grew up on. The old ones didn’t stop leaking, they just slowed the flow. So without any further delay…. the reviews.

This is the Nuby 2 handle sippy. It retails at Diapers.com for $4.99. It has a soft spout and is easy to hold. It requires a bit of skill to align the handles and spout properly so that the handles are to the sides of the spout but it’s not THAT complicated. My kids liked the cup. They chewed on the mouth piece and poked at the air hole above the spout a lot. Eventually, they were both able to poke their finger in the air hole, pull in inside out  and chew on it. This made for major leakage. Many friends use this cup and love it. I have curious, chewy, pokey kids and therefore can’t use this cup. Great bonus with this cup is that it came with a lid! Great for travel in our lunch bag.

This is the Nuby 10 oz sippy gripper. It retails at diapers.com for $2.29. Since this lid is made the exact way the above sippy is, my kids worked their magic and ruined these cups as well.

These are the Nuby two handle straw cups. They retail for $4.99 at Diapers.com. The straw on these cups require the child to bite them to get a flow of liquid. It confused my kids as a first straw cup. I also don’t really like the bite mechanism in straws in general because I feel it teaches kids to chew on their straw which is exactly what we don’t want them to do. I don’t want to have to buy a new straw or look for part of a swallowed straw either!

To the left is The First Years soft spout sippy. It retails at Diapers.com for $3.59 and holds 10oz. It is cute, non-insulated, and has a soft spout. The spout and air spout are basically a slit in the material. This cup leaks whenever shaken, tipped or held upside down.

To the right is the Munchkin insulated straw cup. It holds 9 oz and retails at Diapers.com for $5.99. I like this cup but had two issues with it. One, most of the time when you open the flip top lid the straw spits at you. Two, my kids learned how to close it but had a much harder time opening the flip top. This led to way too much whining for me to open their cup.

To the left is the Playtex sipster. It holds 9 oz and retails for $4.19  at Diapers.com. We really liked this cup. There is a valve in the lid that makes cleaning a two step process but isn’t that big of a deal. After many drops on the floor it will start to leak and/or spit from the spout. A small end of a bottle brush can typically get the spout clean. The only reason I kept searching for another cup after finding this one was to find an insulated cup to keep milk cool for travel.

To the right is the Playtex insulater base spout cup. It’s insulated! It holds 9 oz and retails at Diapers.com for $4.69. This cup got clogged frequently due to the three very small holes in the spout. The small holes make it very difficult to clean as well. I found that I had to blow air through the spout when washing it to clear it. I do not recommend this cup for the spout alone.

Aaaaah, enter the Playtex coolster tumbler. It holds 9 oz and retails at Diapers.com for $5.19. This is our favorite cup. It keeps liquids cool, has a click when you screw the lid on to its appropriate tightness and has a cleanable spout. All the playtex cups I have tried have the same removable valve system in the underside of the lid. It’s been fairly easy to clean. This cup still spits when dropped but I haven’t had any issue with it leaking from the lid – only the spout. I also should mention that the valve on the playtex cups is not flat with the lid. This creates a small problem for kids that want to drink every last drop of liquid in their cup. The last bits of liquid are below the level of the spout when tilted upside down and aren’t reachable. It’s just a sip, not a big deal.

What? All the reviews are of plastic cups? No. So far I have only tried one stainless steel sippy. I don’t like the idea of the kids drinking from plastic, even BPA free plastic. Have you ever let water sit in a plastic water bottle? Even the “safe” water bottles leave the water tasting funny after 12 hours. For this reason, I don’t leave the kids drinks in a cup all day. They have milk cups and water cups. Once they drink their milk at breakfast, I rinse it out and let it dry until their next “milk time” at snack. Their water isn’t left in their cup for more than 4 hours. Why use plastic at all if i’m worried about it? I’m not 100% sold on the stainless steel cup.

Here is the Kleen Kanteen. It is a stainless steel sippy that has many options for lids (sippy, sport spout) and can grow with your children. It holds 12 oz and retails at Diapers.com for $12.95. If you order this product online call and make sure it comes with the sippy lid. I had issues with this but customer service at Diapers.com has always been great to me, so no complaints. You do have to make sure the sippy lid is pushed firmly into the top to prevent leaks. I like this cup. My problem was remembering not to fill it all the way (12 oz is too heavy and too much for my kids to drink in one sitting), and the bottle is COLD when filled with cold liquids. This is a problem if your kid doesn’t want to hold it! If this came with some kind of kid safe cozy I’d use it MUCH more than I do. As a side note, when the cup gets dropped, the paint chips. My recommendation is to get the plain, unpainted cup, so as not to worry about kids eating the paint. Yes my kids also gnawed away at these cups. What did you expect? These are the same kids that like to chew on our windowsills….

I have a favorite straw sippy! It is from green sprouts and is a 10 oz. BPA free bottle. This is the cup I let the kids walk around the house with (water only). It has a flip closure on the lid with a little tab on it so the kids can open and close it with only a little fuss. It will leak a bit of what was in the straw if turned upside down but it doesn’t spit at me when I open the lid! I use the tiny brushes from Doc Brown to clean out the straws. Green sprouts thought ahead and included a replacement for the top part of the straw for kids like mine who are furious chewers. I found this bottle while shopping at Whole Foods but found it cheaper at Amazon for $8.

I would love your help in the search for the perfect sippy! Please leave your favorites in the comments section on this post.

To see my most recent find, a straw sippy cup that is stainless steel, click HERE.

How to bottle feed two babies at the same time

This is not as easy as it seems…. As I remember those bottle feeding days I shutter just a bit. THAT was a LOT of work. I remember counting down the days until the babies feedings would be just a little farther apart. I would beg to get help to come over, and time it just right, so that they would be there when it was time to feed the babies! It’s not that putting a bottle in their mouth is all that hard. It’s just that feeding two at the same time gets…. complicated.

When the babies were small enough to need to be burped during each feed (this stage seemed to take forever to grow out of) I would strap them both into their bouncy chairs. All safe and secure and only slightly reclined, it was a great comfy seat for them. I would sit on the FLOOR with my back against the couch. (Not so comfy for me but who’s thinking of themselves when trying to feed hungry babies, right?) The bouncy chairs would be on each side of me, with the babies facing me at an angle. It only got complicated when it was time to burp them. That meant, I had to stop feeding both babies, burp one, console them both (babies don’t particularly like it when you take their food away), then switch babies and burp the second baby. Then we started the process over again. I got really good at singing for their entertainment during burping sessions. As I recall the “oldie but goodie” “Sherry Baby” was a hit with both of them. I would swap out Sherry for their names to make it a custom tune. (Occasionally they would take 10 minutes or more to get a good burp out and I was so concerned that they would be screaming 20 minutes later, with an aching belly, that I very rarely gave up on getting a burp from either one of them.)

Flash forward to this last weekend. I am a garage sale moocher. I leeched onto my friend Chris’ garage sale (I’m not allowed to have a garage sale where I live – boo hoo) and brought a bunch of my infant items over to sell. Of course, we talk about all the equipment we used for our twins. She shows me a Bottle Snuggler. A what? A bottle snuggler.

And to think, all my burping induced nerve wreckage could have been prevented if I had just learned about this simple device. Well, at least i’m telling you…. So, visit the bottle snuggler website and learn all about how helpful they are. Oh the things we learn after the fact….