bye-bye bottles

Today I hid all of the bottles. No more. At her last checkup I was told to get rid of them. We'd been using them only for sleep time because sometimes she'd insist that she wants a bottle and not a sippy cup and that's not a moment when you want a meltdown, you just want a sleeping baby. But a few nights I gave her a sippy cup instead and she didn't even seem to notice. I think we've been slow to stop using them not just because of Sophie, but because it's easy to fill them up and give them to her. Like so many things with young children, it's easy to take the path of least resistance. She signs milk, we are happy that she can express herself and gladly fill up a bottle full of milk for her. But at the same time, I'm sick of cleaning bottles since we don't have a dishwasher. For about six to eight months we were cleaning five bottles a day by hand. Recently, we're down to one or two, but it still seems like there are always bottles that need to be washed. For whatever reason, sippy cups seem so bother me less--probably because they take 1/5 of the time to wash. So, we'll see if we are all strong enough to move on and leave the bottles behind. Stay tuned.