Baby Bottle Organization – we FINALLY got it down!

We never planned on using our bottles right away, so when we got home from the hospital and found ourselves needing to use bottles for all of Madeleine’s feeds, we did whatever we could to stay afloat. We ordered more bottles, that grass thingy to dry them, and pulled out the sterilizer. As the days turned into weeks which turned into months we settled in to our new normal – BOTTLES ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE. Turns out baby bottle organization isn’t as easy as you’d think when you’ve got a zillion parts you use multiple times a day.

Since we don’t have a dish washer, we thoroughly wash EVERYTHING by hand, and we decided to stock up on extra bottles so that we could go at least one full day without needing to clean them. They ended up piled into a corner of the kitchen and were such an eye sore. Bottles were a source of emotional distress for me, as I had always planned on breastfeeding but a postpartum hemorrhage killed my milk supply. I went from “well, the bottles are there for when we need them,” to WE NEED THOSE 3 BOTTLES RIGHT NOW!

Eventually it just got so overwhelming that even when we’d clean the kitchen, that corner was stuck in DISASTER ZONE. I’ll show you, but don’t judge me!

YIKES, amiright?! We had two super random baskets/bins that I’d try to offload some lesser used stuff onto (lids!), but they always ended up looking like a hot mess. And the drying racks! What an eyesore! Not only did it look terrible, but trying to fish out the parts with a very impatient baby was slowly eating away at my soul.

I looked online and saw a lot of people recommended one of those stacked 3-4 drawer organizer things, but I thought, “there is a better, cuter way.”

and y’all, I did it.

Personally I think this is better than those drawers that look like they belong in a craft room. It might take up a little bit more space, but I think it’s worth it. This is what that corner of our kitchen looks like now:

I KNOW, RIGHT?! You might be thinking, “Stephanie.. you didn’t organize anything, you just got rid of it all!” but that’s not true. I’m all about function. and here’s the function. We run everything through the sterilizer, which is right next to these drying racks. So it makes sense to empty it and let things dry right here. But we actually prepare the bottles in an area a few feet away. …why not store the clean, dried bottles there? It’s so silly but saving a few seconds of each bottle preparation adds up. It’s just easier.

As long as all of the parts are dried, I put them together. When it’s time to make a bottle, you just grab a bottle, pour the distilled water in it (which we store in that pretty iridescent carafe because why the heck not?), grab the canister of formula and EVERYTHING you need is right there. Bottles used to be the absolute worst, but getting a system together that is both functional AND as cute as I could imagine. Plus, when we’re ready to store our bottles, I can definitely use those acrylic drawers for something else. For now, they’re perfect for baby bottle organization!

So there you have it! The way we’ve figured out how to store some of the most essential (and often annoying, just being real) parts of our lives today.