If you are expecting a newborn or have recently given birth, you know that your house will end up with dozens if not hundreds of new items such as baby feeding products.
It’s no surprise that the baby care market is valued at $47.7 billion worldwide!
With such a vast array of baby feeding products, how do you stay organized?
Below we provided the top nine tips for organizing your baby care items specifically bottles and sippy cups. Read on for some great advice!
Set up a space large enough for all of your supplies
The first step you need to take is to clear enough space on a kitchen counter top for all of your baby feeding products.
It might be a good idea to clear a space away from the usual area where you do your home cooking. If you don’t have enough space in the kitchen on the counter tops, you can always purchase a cabinet with drawer space to store baby bottles and other items.
Set up the most important baby feeding products first
The most important parts should be positioned at your baby bottle station first such as the bottle warmer and sterilizer. Don’t forget to position the clean drying rack for storing washed baby bottles.
After these items have been positioned, you can add all extra baby feeding products and accessories.
Young mothers will learn that having clean and ready-to-go baby bottles will be a necessity from the moment they give birth. Babies cannot wait for a bottle to be cleaned before getting fed.
As such, you’ll need to have a drying rack set up as well as a bottle sterilizer and bottle warmer. This will let you quickly and efficiently prepare a warm bottle of milk for your infant.
You would also benefit from putting a towel down to hold bottles and accessories. Remember to change the towel regularly to avoid mildew.
Have drawers nearby to hold extra baby feeding products
It’s very likely that you will have lots of extra bottles and bottle nipples that will need storage. As such, it’s useful to have drawers nearby holding these items.
Babies tend to grow up very quickly so you may need the next size up of a bottle, sippy cup, or another accessory.
You might want drawers or a cabinet storing these supplies either right above or right below your baby bottle station.
You may need to move some dishes or cooking items out of the way, but you won’t regret it! Having these objects nearby will save you the hassle of looking around the entire kitchen for additional bottles when all the rest get used up.
Babies will often grow at unexpected times so you never know when you need to feed them or when the bottles they need change.
Having larger volumes, more pacifiers and a bigger nipple size stored next to the bottle station will save you plenty of time and hassle in the long run. The drawers and cabinet space can also be great for storing extra formula.
You can use drawers to better organize small parts such as pacifiers and baby spoons once your child is old enough to eat baby jar items. Drawers can also be a great place to store lids and nipples.
You might want to remove any zip lock bags and get Tupperware to store items instead. That will be a less bulky and less cluttered way of storing baby feeding products.
As your children grow, you may need to add sippy cups and snacks to that drawer as well! Essentially, it’s a great place to store things your child will grow into.
Add a bin for dirty items or used up bottles
You will need an area to store those baby feeding products that are dirty or used up. You’ll find yourself with multiple bottles that need a place to stay in between sterilizations and washes.
Adding an extra bin to hold used up baby bottles will help you so much especially when you have plenty of dishes piling up at the sink.
You can use anything to store used up pacifiers or dirty bottles even a small bucket by the side of your sink.
A separate area to store these items away from the usual dirty dishes is useful because you never know when a glass bottle could fall and break.
Make a plan for mixing formula
When making the formula for your child, you’ll need a plan for how to organize the whole ordeal. There are multiple styles for mixing formula.
For example, you can mix the formula and water whenever your child is hungry and crying out to be fed. This may not be the best strategy since you’ll also need to comfort the baby at the same time.
However, you can also mix formula in a pitcher and make sure to use it up within 24 hours. If you’re making a pitcher of formula, be sure to add a piece of tape with the time on it so that you don’t accidentally feed your baby formula after the 24-hour mark.
Another strategy for organizing your baby feeding products is to make individuals bottles full of formula ahead of time and line them up in the refrigerator.
In fact, you can try your hand at multiple ways of getting the formula mixed and ready to go. You can put bottles in the fridge for nighttime feedings and consider making a pitcher of formula for the daytime.
A bottle warmer will help with this last method since you want to warm up the milk and formula before feeding your baby.
By getting these processes completed ahead of time, you’ll make sure your baby isn’t hungry. Your baby will be happy and well-fed.
Purchase baby care items of the same size and style
If you already bought various bottles and feeding accessories of different sizes and shapes, you likely have a clutter problem showing up in your house.
Consider donating items that are of varying shapes, styles, and sizes and keeping the ones that look the same. Having items that look the same will make it easier to store and fit the products together.
Pick a style and size of sippy cups and bottles that you like the best and donate the rest to another mother with a newborn. You can also potentially sell any nice-looking bottles that you’re not interested in keeping by throwing a garage sale.
Organize your baby feeding items by zones
When you are positioning bottles and accessories at your station, you may want to put similar items in the same zones or spaces.
For instance, you can put your pumping bottles on the right side and feeding bottles to the left. You can move sippy cups and food pouches farther along.
Keeping all these items in the same place will make it easier to find and they will line up more nicely than if everything was haphazardly strewn about the kitchen space.
Be sure to have a specific zone or space for each item!
Label everything!
One of the best ways to keep everything organized is to label every item that’s been put away in a drawer or a cabinet. This will make it much easier to find what you’re searching for.
When you have the chance, go out and buy a label maker to make your life much easier in the kitchen.
A label maker won’t just make your life easier but your family members as well. If you label every storage item, your children and husband will know exactly where to put foods, utensils and cooking supplies when they’re done using them.
You can label shelves, drawers, and more! This will make your life much more simple when searching for any baby care items or other cooking supplies.
Get rid of extra materials you never use
Do you find that you don’t use the baby bottles or nipples stored in the very back of a closet or cabinet?
Are you always using the same bottles in your kitchen while others are just collecting dust?
If so, be sure to donate or sell those extra items in order to remove the extra clutter from your kitchen. When trying to stay organized, one of the key steps is to remove extraneous items.
Don’t keep more cooking supplies and feeding items than you need. Doing so only takes up valuable cabinet or closet space.
If you’re looking to keep your kitchen clean and tidy, you’ll need to remove those extraneous items you never use.
These nine tips for organizing baby care items and baby feeding products should help you keep a tidy kitchen and help you find everything you need quickly and easily.
As a new mother, you probably have your own ways of keeping organized.
