Enough is Enough, Sometimes It's Too Much

How much is enough? That's a tough question and it really depends on what you are talking about. Gorgonzola cheese? Never enough. Worn-out holed-up socks? Even one is too much.

So let's think about some of the less obvious ones. Sippy cups and bottles. Whoa. This is gonna get deep fast!

When my youngest was still of the cooing, bottle age I had a lot of bottles. And I mean a lot. Being as thrifty (okay, cheap) as I am, I hit every garage sale in our 'hood the summer before she arrived. And at each one I bought bottles; but really for pennies on the dollar who could pass them up?! I boiled them several times and bought all new nipples. By the time fall rolled around I had a brand-new baby and seriously 40+ bottles. I thought I was set.



Set for disaster was more like it. I was young and lived in a very small starter place (this is code for my kitchen was honestly the size of my pantry now). Bottles don't nest, they don't stack, and if you leave them alone in a dark cupboard you'll find they seem to create new baby bottles (pun intended, sorry).

With all of these bottles at my disposal there was no great urgency to wash the used ones. I couldn't really tell if any were missing, say under the couch, left in the diaper bag or, the mother of stenches, in the car on a summer day. So as my clean bottle supply dwindled my dirty stash, well it grew and grew and then grew some stuff.

Fast forward to baby number two. We started with six bottles. I thought I had learned from my mistakes with the first. The lesson had been learned: way too many bottles was BAD.

But as a mother of two I often found myself up for a feeding at night and all six bottles were dirty. Nothing infuriates a postpartum mother like the inability to feed her child, even if she is to blame. The solution was simple, just one more pack of bottles. Now we had nine. But some were lost, one leaked and one, I admit it, grew something. So we got another pack and then another and another.

While I never got back to the epic amount I had with baby number one, the bottle population was exploding. And then one night as I stood scrubbing 19 bottles at 2 am (the inappropriate response of the hormonal mom) I realized, no matter how many bottles we owned we would not wash bottles until that number was dirty. We were in survival mode at that point, if something wasn't on fire it wasn't addressed. So if we had 11 bottles we would wash bottles when number 12 was needed, 24 needing number 25, etc. So I did the unthinkable, I threw almost all of them away.

When number three arrived she had three bottles: one to be using, one to be drying post-scrub and one to be at the ready. Whoa. Told you this was going to get deep.

Now with two young ones still using sippy cups, I own exactly four sippies. Yes, four! Each little one has a thermos-style cup for the day and as the day progresses and drinks are switched, milk for juice and back, I give them a good soapy swish and put the same cup back in their hand. So we dirty only two sippies a day. And we never lose them because we look until we find them. I am never stuck without a clean cup because the kids' set for the next day comes out of the dishwasher during it's 'off-day'. The system is nearly flawless.

Sure there can always be a hiccup. A child throws a sippy cup in the toilet (hey, it happens) or it is left at grandma's. You have the back up and you know a wash and a run by g-ma's will get you back on track.

My cupboard has space for other items, the back of my sink isn't full of "soaking bottles" (admit it, you know what I mean) and I am never standing sink-side for hours scrubbing week-old dried milk.

So if you have enough bottles and or sippy cups, you probably have too many.