With Nick now a year old the days of bottle use are numbered. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was cleaning Nick’s bottles and getting them all ready for when we got home from the hospital. Choosing the right bottle can be a difficult task. Never mind that some babies don’t take to certain ones. I wasn’t too worried about that since we were starting bottles right from the start. Still there are a lot of choices out there. You want to choose one that you like and that you think will be best for your child.
My Choice
When creating my registry I had no clue what kind of bottle I wanted. I choose the Playtex VentAire bottles. They came in a gift pack with multiple sizes and different types of nipples. The different choices seemed like a good thing, so that was what we chose. At the time we really wanted to get the registry started, so we knew that none of our choices were set in stone.
After making the registry I kind of forgot about it for awhile. Later when I started finalizing it I started to pay attention to ads that I saw for different bottles. I still wasn’t really sure what made a bottle good. Then I saw an ad for the bottle we had chosen. It said that the design of the bottle was meant to help reduce the amount of air that the baby takes in while drinking. This in turn was supposed to help with prevent ear infections. When I saw that I was totally sold. Ear infections have been a big problem for some of the kids in my family, so anything that could help prevent them was good in my book. I am happy to say that so far (knock on wood) Nick has not had a single ear infection.
What I Liked
I have been very happy with the Playtex VentAire bottles. They’re very easy to hold. One thing that I really like is that their bent shape allows a child to drink from them while sitting up straight. This was a God send when Nick had his terrible sinus infection. They also were very good at keeping Nick from swallowing too much air. The problem with this though was that it made it really hard to get Nick to burp.
What I Didn’t Like
The most annoying thing about the Playtex VentAire bottles is that it takes forever to wash them. Each bottle has six pieces to it. That makes for a lot of parts to wash. Nick only uses 3 bottles a day now, but that still means that I have eighteen different pieces to wash every night. When he used to drink a lot of bottles this really made bottle washing take up a lot of time.
The other thing about the bottles that wasn’t so good was that the bottoms can leak. This is a common complaint with these bottles. The one thing I have found is that you can pretty much eliminate this problem by making sure the pieces are all dry before reassembling the bottles. The bottom vent piece and the vent ring can’t suction the bottom closed if they’re wet.
A complaint that I’ve also read is that over time the dishwasher wears away the measuring lines on the side. I’m not sure how common this problem is though. I chose to always hand wash our bottles, so we have not had this problem.
Over a year later I feel that we made the best choice when picking out our bottles. We have had a wonderful experience with the Playtex VentAire bottles. I would chose the same ones again in a heartbeat. It is crazy to think that I’ll soon be putting them away.
