Bottle Drying Racks

As much as I would have loved to have stayed home with the Pickle for forever, and nursed her without ever needing to pump, it wasn't really an option for us.  We wanted to, you know, eat and such.  And feeding her seemed like a pretty cool idea, too.

Since we knew we would have to use some bottles, we are reasonably intelligent people and knew we'd need to wash those bottles.  And, taking our powers of deduction a step further, we knew that we would need something on which to dry the bottles after we washed them.  Our kitchen at our old townhouse was insanely small, so this was going to be a little bit of a problem, as we didn't really have a ton of counter-space or room in the cupboards to accomplish this.

A close girlfriend had strongly, strongly recommend the Dr. Brown's Drying Rack (LINK), which ran about $15 at the time ($13 now on Amazon):

You can tell from there essentially what it does.  It has two racks - the lower shelf is very short, so it's used for the cap and nipple parts of Dr. Brown bottles, and the bottles can be put on the top shelf.  It's not beautiful or much to look at, but it's utilitarian.

We ended up not using Dr. Brown's bottles very often (Pickle didn't have any tummy issues that required their ventilation system, and they were sort of a leaky pain in the butt), so we didn't really need the lower rack a whole bunch.  We'd put our Medela bottle caps on there, but they only fit so-so, and I hated having to lift the top rack off any time we washed bottles.  We ended up mostly just using the top shelf - which was okay, but if we did a huge batch of bottles, we ended up not having a ton of room for both the bottles and the nipples/caps, so we'd be using those peg things and everything else just to try and cram a bunch of stuff on there.  It worked okay, and we used it the whole time Pickle was little, but I just don't think it was an incredibly efficient use of space.  And it was really ONLY useful for bottles, as the little nubs on which the bottles rest aren't really tall enough to support a sippy cup.

If we have another child, I don't think we'd probably use this drying rack again.  After a lot of looking around at Buy Buy Baby and Babies R Us, I think we'd probably get the Boon Winter Grass Countertop Drying Rack (LINK), which currently runs a few dollars more at $15 on Amazon:

As you can tell from the photo, it's not huge (9.5 inches by 9.5 inches), so you may want to get two plots of grass if you have a lot of bottles.  But I think this idea is a lot more practical than the Dr. Brown's rack.  There's not just a limited number of nub-thingies, there is nothing but nub-thingies on this rack.  You can essentially choose what items you want to put on there, how many you can fit, and where they go.  The nubs are deeper than the shorter ones on the Dr. Brown's rack, so you can put silverware and sippy cups on there.  Additionally, it's much more visually appealing than the Dr. Brown's rack (especially if you have a modern kitchen/house).  It's free of PVCs, BPAs, and phthalates, as well, so it should be very safe to come in contact with items that will go in baby's mouth.

Additionally, you can make a whole little garden with the add-on accessories that Boon makes.  They have flowers and twigs that you can hang in there to increase the number of nipples and caps you can hang, so that they're not taking up as much of the "grass" area.  They both look like this:

I believe you can get both the accessories and the "grass" both come in various colors, as well, so you can make them work with your color scheme.  I like a lot of Boon's stuff, because I think it's fun and creative, and so this is something I'll likely try in the future, given the chance.