Great bottle system

When my wife and I had our baby in January ('08), we started out with Dr. Browns bottle system. It was overly complicated, and about two weeks ago we switched over to the Playtex drop-in system. What a difference!

Now let me be clear. I know that this is supposed to be just for the liners, but I'm going to talk about the whole bottle system. First, though, the liners are excellent. They work as advertised. Playtex even guarantees there won't be any leaks, and there aren't. These liners stay where they're supposed to go. There are actually two types of liners that work with this bottle--there are non pre-formed liners that are basically bags that you fit over the opening (think sandwich bag) and then there are these, the pre-formed liners that actually have a ring (with apologies for being crass, they look like over-sized condoms). The sandwich bag style cost about $4.99 for 140, while these cost about $7 for 100. Is it worth the extra expense? Absolutely.

My wife and I really like this system. With the pre-formed bags, we haven't had a leak yet, and we can fix an entire bottle ONE HANDED! Let me say that again, when Kent is throwing a fit and we have to hold him to calm him down, we can STILL open the bottle, put in a liner, fill it with water, put in the formula, put on the nipple, screw on the top, shake it up and begin feeding with ONE HAND! That's huge. We could never do that with Dr. Browns.

I guess the downside to this system is that every feeding now costs us between 6-8 cents apiece. One box lasts us about three weeks to a month. You might think that's a lot, until you start thinking about the amount of time you save not washing bottles. Even if you want to factor out the time savings, reusable bottles aren't free to use, once you factor in soap and water costs. Less than 7 cents? Probably. But I'm willing to pay the difference for convenience.

The bags fit in easily. As the name implies, they "drop into" the bottle. Figuring out exactly how much liquid you've got in the bottle is a little tricky because the bottle has two readings (one for the non-pre-formed bags, and one for the pre-formed bags). The markings for the pre-formed bags aren't easy to figure out, because the bags are supposed to expand to 10 ounces, and there's only markings for 8 ounces. Confusing. Still, these are already sterilized (so you don't have to get a sterilization system), they take hot liquids VERY well, and it's nice to just throw away a liner when you're done with feeding.

Another huge advantage of this entire system is how little space it requires. With our Dr. Browns system, we had a little tub to put dirty bottles waiting to be cleaned, a microwave sterilizer to put cleaned bottles to be sterilized, and a drying rack to air dry sterilized bottles. We had six bottles that were constantly in this cycle. All told, it took about 3-4 feet of valuable countertop real estate. With the Playtex system, we have three bottles, six nipples and a little dishwasher box to put them in. The bottles don't need to be washed very often because they never come in contact with the formula. The parts that need to be cleaned are the nipples and rings, and those we just put in the dishwasher. Everything else can be stowed away. Even with an open box of inserts on the counter and all three bottles waiting to be used, we use about 9 inches of countertop space. Big difference.

For those of you who are concerned about our "carbon footprint" or believe that we should recycle as much as we can, this product definitely isn't for you. Every time you feed your baby, you'll be throwing something away. I personally don't buy the over consumption mentality, so this doesn't bother me at all. But for those of you who do, you will want to steer clear of this.

My biggest gripe with the Playtex system (and I realize this isn't about the bags) are the Playtex nipples. They've got a "variable" Y-cut nipple that's just not wide enough to let cereal go through. However, 5 seconds with a pair of Fiskar scissors fixes this problem pretty easily.

I love having something that's cheap, simple, and ONE HANDED (did I mention that?). It's also Bisphenol A (BPA) free, which is controversial, but gets me away from the whole controversy. If you're not aware of the BPA controversy, do a Google search and you'll have more information than you ever wanted. The short version is that many plastic bottles leech BPA into your baby's formula. Is that a bad thing? Nobody knows. But it's easy enough to avoid the whole controversy with this system.