As a working mother, I fully believe I have two or more jobs. I have the typical 8-5 (who actually works 9-5?) job. I also am a mother and a wife. It is my job to prepare the bottles, diapers, wipes, etc. for day care every day. It is also under my job description to get A up, dressed, lunch made, and breakfast ate before going to school. That is a job I feel I should be compensated for sometimes. I usually take my payment in the form of warm, quiet baths or sleeping in on the weekend. Bonus is I don’t have to claim it on taxes.
For the CDC on base here we are required (and it makes sense to me, no arguments here) to put your child’s name on every bottle. After a week of masking tape and marker, I immediately set out on a search to look for something easier. I had noticed that one of the girls in T’s class had this band with her name on it. I wanted to find one too!
After putting in a few choice words in the search engine (baby bottle labels), a website called Inchbug popped up. Two parents founded the company in 2004 and developed the product called Orbit Label. There is the Custom Labels and the Pre-printed labels. T doesn’t have an overly common name, so my purchase was the Custom Labels.
Orbit labels are name labels for baby bottles, sippy cups (straw sippy cups are recommended these days, FYI), water bottles, etc. The bands are similar to the “Live Strong” bands that people wear on their wrist… or their ankle like my 8 year old. They can be boiled, microwaved, put through the dishwasher, and sterilized. I have absolutely fallen in love with these.
I put them on our wide neck Dr. Brown bottles and have never had to take them off. They go on fairly easy and the rubber material grips the bottle in a way that it doesn’t move a centimeter. I can move them and take them off too for when we move to sippy cups. I chose to put T’s whole name on the label. These bands literally save me about 5 minutes a day that I would spend labeling masking tape. And for the low price of $12.95 for 4 custom labels, I was jumping for joy. I was expecting something more like $20 or $30. Oddly the pre-printed labels have only 3 labels in a package. I actually made out better ordering custom since I have to have four bottles for T every day.
I can not say enough about these labels. I am thrilled with them. While on their website, I also found their Date Stickers. I ordered the 5-pack since we also label with the date every bottle every day. In a moment of excitement, I misread the colors and ordered Watermelon rather than Green Apple thinking Watermelon was green. Note my surprise when pink labels showed up with my green bands. Duuuuh… Completely my fault, not Inchbug’s. I didn’t send them back since they weren’t all that expensive and T is secure enough to use pink labels. I will note that I donated one sheet to my daycare for anyone who needed it and admitted my blunder. They laughed and were grateful for it. How do the stickers fair? Well…
The stickers are not my favorite. They are still easier to use than masking tape, but they are not perfect. They are made to go on and come off easy. My CDC heats the bottles up using water in a warmed crockpot so the labels can get wet. If they get wet, they don’t always peel off right. They occasionally leave a residue behind. The residue can be rolled away with a little wiping with my finger, but it’s an irritation. I do like that I can write out the dates in advance on Sunday for Monday through Friday. So when I prepare the bottles at night, I can just stick them on as they are ready to go.
On a final note, these are the only two products I have purchased. Shipping was fast by USPS in a flat rate envelope. I adore my Orbit Labels and recommend them to every one, even stay at home moms. The date stickers could be improved, but I don’t know that they ever intended for them to get wet so I don’t know that I can blame Inchbug for that. I have not yet purchased any other products from them, but they do have other useful and cute items I have considered. Say a big fat Yay! for the Orbit Labels. I highly recommend them!
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