Our favorite on the go & at home toddler cups with straws

Becoming a parent is truly like joining a strange club where literally nobody knows what they’re doing. I have spent a lot of time texting friends asking “what did you do when…” or “I saw that you tried….” and at the end of the day we’re all holding our breath to see if the thing that has been working for the past 2 days will continue to work for the next 2 days.

I’ve had a few of my friends ask me about cups. Who knew that cups could be such a huge topic of conversation? With roughly 28456 different brands and models of CUPS on the market, it makes sense that trying all of them could get really exhausting and very spendy.

Now that Madeleine is way beyond the bottles (thank you Jesus), her main form of liquid is water. She has milk a few times a week, and we keep that in a separate sippy cup. But water is her JAM. It’s the thing she asks for, the thing I encourage her to have the most, and the thing we always make sure we take with us.

We’ve settled on two different kinds of cups for Madeleine – one of them is strictly for at-home use (and honestly leans more towards smoothie beverages than routine water consumption) and the other is for any and all purposes. My favorite cups for her are toddler cups with straws because of everything I’ve read about the benefit of straw cups over sippy cups. A great place for cup resources is The Dentist Mom on Instagram.

First up are these Cupkin cups. They are DARLING. Definitely for anybody who is sensitive to aesthetics or has aversions to the highly marketed bright, bold colors of many other similar cups. We bought a 2-pack of these cute 8.5 oz cups on Amazon Prime Day and I know we’ll be back for more.

After we bought ours, Cupkin shared that they had a new part that would truly make their straw pull-out proof. They asked us to send a copy of our order number and they sent us over the new parts for free, and it definitely made a difference!

The Cupkin cups are stainless steel, which is a big deal for me. I try to limit Madeleine’s exposure to plastic (“try to” being the most important part of that sentence, as I am looking at a plastic ride on airplane, plastic phone, legos, plastic vacuum… you get the drill. but I am TRYING) so I love these.

These are more special occasion cups, because we use them for smoothies. I love that even when she knocks them over on her high chair, the straw stays in and the smoothie stays safe. Madeleine loves that she gets to hold her own cup and drink her own smoothie.

Our #1 most favorite toddler cups with straws for everyday use are definitely these Thermos cups. We actually found a few of them brand new at Goodwill and bought them on a whim. They are stainless steel, have very few parts, and are incredibly durable. We took one with us to Disneyland and we always have them laying around for Madeleine to sip out of.

Now that she has mastered the art of opening the lid (she has been working VERY hard at this in the last few months), I’m even more excited to take these on the go with us because now she can be completely self-sufficient when it comes to getting her water.

I will say, we have one that has a design on it (as opposed to these solid gold ones, and we have a few solid pink ones) and the stickers/decals on them have started peeling off, so I would stick to the solid colored ones or wash exclusively by hand.

Maybe it’s summer, maybe it’s the world starting to re-open, but we’ve been taking her cups with us a lot more lately. She’s gone into the nursery at church a few times, we’ve met up with friends for walks and have gone to parks. With so many new places to misplace our beloved (and kind of spendy) cups, I was so excited to get her name labels for them. These waterproof fairy wand stickers from Name Bubbles are PERFECT for our little magical girl. They are dishwasher safe (and we have a dishwasher now, hooray!), and come in a BUNCH of different shapes and colors, all customizable.