Green Baby Series: Bottles and Cups

When I first had the idea for a green baby series, I thought I could cram all this good info into one post. I quickly realized I was wrong. So I made a basic outline for the entire series and wrote up the first two posts about diapering and bath and body products just in time for Earth day. Last week, I had intended to write about everything that goes into a baby’s mouth, but had to stop at pacifiers and teethers. This week, I thought I would finish up writing about everything involving feeding, but it got too lengthy with just bottles and sippy cups!

 

Bottles are one of those areas that can leave a first time mom feeling completely overwhelmed. Somehow, you choose a bottle (or spend a small fortune trying every single brand), and then less than a year later, you have to do the whole process all over again with sippy cups. I personally found sippy cups to be a more difficult venture, and there are 0 green sippy cups sold in stores. The recent movement to get rid of BPA has led consumers to believe that their products are free of harmful substances, but just because a plastic bottle is marked 'BPA-free' does not mean that it is safe. This article, with citations from a credible study, gives a brief description about why we should stay away from plastics in general. This study, supported by the National Institute of Health (NIH), lists research that plastic products, including BPA-free baby bottles, still release estrogenic chemicals.

Bottles
Somehow, I settled on Dr. Brown's bottles, and I have been very happy with my choice. One of the selling points of Dr. Brown's bottles is that the million pieces help reduce the air that enters the baby's belly and causes tummy aches. Since I only know of one time when my son acted like he had a belly ache as an infant, I believe that was in part because of the bottles we chose, although I don’t have anything to compare it to. While the internal pieces remain the same, Dr. Brown's does sell glass bottles. The last set we purchased were glass, and we never had a problem with them breaking, or falling on baby's head or anything like that. Caden was never into holding his own bottle until he was much older (plastic or glass), so I can't comment on whether it affected him being able to hold it on his own or not. But really, I enjoyed giving my son a bottle, which also could be the reason he never wanted to hold it on his own!

Sippy Cups

These are just as difficult as bottles. Not only are there as many options, but they are more expensive. We started out with a cheap Nuby sippy with a nipple to get my son the hang of drinking out of something other than a bottle, and then we switched to a straw cup around 10 months. When it comes to plastic sippy cups, we really like the Lolla cup, which is a weighted straw cup made in the USA. It does leak when turned upside down, but we don't let Caden run around with a sippy cup so that is not a problem for us. When I started researching green sippy cups, I found that there weren't a lot of options, and the ones that were available were either poorly rated or super expensive (or both). After a lot of research, I finally decided on the stainless steel PuraKiki, and we are very happy with the bottle. The bottle is stainless steal as well as the collar, and the nipple (for infants) and sip spout is silicone. Laura has a great review of most of the brands of stainless steal sippy cups, including the Pura Kiki.  I would like to have a stainless steal straw cup for my son, but I don’t let Caden nurse his milk so I don’t think we will have a problem. When Caden gets a little older, he will use the mason jars with metal lids that we use.

Next week I will be posting about organic food choices, the easiest way to start going green!