The good: Dr. Brown's baby bottles

Even if you are nursing it is nice to have a few bottles on hand for those occasions when you are away from your baby on a date, out with friends, or letting Daddy take over a late night feeding. I started out using Avent bottles, but the milk seemed to leak out both sides of his mouth no matter the size of nipple I used. Quite a few of my friends were using Dr. Brown's so I gave them a try. They take a little assembling, but basically there is a long tube that runs down the middle of the bottle. It is supposed to act as a pressure regulator as the baby feeds simulating breast feeding. This reduces gas, colic, spitting up and helps to maintain essential nutrients in the milk.

The instructions say to fill with water, add formula and then "swirl" until dissolved so the formula doesn't get stuck in the tube. To side step the stupid swirling I would put my hand over the top before adding the tube and shake it. Until I tried it one day with all the pieces in place and just shook it to see what would happen. No clumps of formula in the tube. No need to swirl .... I can't believe I did that as long as I did ;) Silly new Mama .... we'll fall for anything.

They have a whole line of accessories that cover the gamut of bottle care. Brushes, sterilizers, cooler tote bags, glass bottles and more. I liked the brush just fine, but I was not wild about the drying rack. It said it was specifically made for Dr. Brown's bottles, but these bottles are really tall and the rods that support the bottles are really short. The bottles flop all over the place and doesn't look organized. This sort of bothers me since I like to keep a clean kitchen. Admittedly it doesn't look that bad in the picture, but with all 6 bottles, plus all the pieces it looks messy. Plus, even though there are 2 levels of storage it is really tough to use the bottom rack without taking the top rack off. I did that for a while then I gave up and just started making a pile of stuff on the top shelf. Again .... messy.

I do have a couple of bottles that leak, but I think that may have happened the one time I set my dishwasher to "sanitize" and it totally overheated everything I washed. It think that extra heat did something to the bottle top seal. It literally melted my food processor into a pile of plastic and that spinner thingy at the bottom of the dishwasher got annihilated.

The only mishap I had with leaking bottles outside the house was when one leaked into my diaper bag. These bottles take a little assembly as I said and they come with these little white disks. If you don't put the disk between the rubber top that is attached to the tube and the nipple it will leak. I thought it was ok to throw away those disks until I went to the store and saw that replacement disks were for sale. I went home and read the instructions and figured out that they are essential when packing away bottles with liquid in them.

Since these bottles are plastic (and I over heated them) I would probably get new ones if I had another baby. I have a few 4 ounce bottles that I used when he was really little so those are fine, but I would replace the 8 ounce ones. I only have 6 bottles that I use everyday and then wash at night so it's not a huge loss to replace them. The 4 and 8 ounce bottles are the same price and they run $14.99 for a 3-pack. The drying rack was $16.99 and bottle brush $4.49.

On a practical note (if somewhat girly) the bottles are very slim so they don't take up a lot of much needed space in your diaper bag compared to short, wide bottles. I have even started carrying 2 bottles for those longer days away from the house (one for milk, one for water) and it hasn't over crowded things.