I'm a failure at sippy cups.

You wouldn't even think that was a thing, but it is. And if anyone could be it, it's me.

Lucas never really took a bottle (I think the most he ever drank from one was half an ounce), so when it was time to introduce him to drinking water, I just skipped over bottles and went straight to sippy cups - the ones with the soft spout. So when our pediatrician said that you were supposed to wean babies off of bottles at age one because of something to do with the way a baby's teeth develop, I zoned out and thought about something more relevant to me - like chocolate - because Lucas never took a bottle anyway. And then a few weeks ago, a friend of mine noticed that I was still giving Lucas a sippy cup with a soft spout, and said that those are a no-no after age one, too. Drat!

The only non-soft sippy cups we had were some that are "designed" so that you can either keep reusing them or just throw them away, which translates to, "nobody really wants to use these cups more than once anyway, because the lids come off super easily and the cup will flood your kitchen floor if your kid so much as taps it, so you might as well just throw them out right after you buy them."

So we went to the store and spent much longer than could possibly be considered normal trying to pick out new sippy cups. And of course by that I mean that I stared at the sippy cups for a really long time while Dan did something else that didn't involve staring at cups, and then finally I asked him to pick between two different kinds, and he picked one, and then I was pretty sure he picked the wrong one.

We brought home two different kinds, both of which claimed to be non-spill. (To be fair, one didn't actually say it was non-spill, but it had a picture of a drop of water on it with a red circle and a line through it, which either means "non-spill" or "don't put any liquids in this cup." In retrospect, it probably meant the second thing.)  One cup had no spout or straw, but was "revolutionary" and "orthodontist recommended" because it was "lip-activated." The idea is that it looks like a regular cup with a lid on top, and then when your child puts his mouth over the rim of the cup, the top presses down and water comes out. Lucas did not figure out how to drink out of it, but it took him all of four seconds to figure out how to turn it upside down and press on the lid so that the water poured onto the floor.

The other kind of cup seemed like a pretty standard sippy cup, so I gave it to him for dinner and then again at bedtime. Sometimes he likes to take his sippy cup to bed with him (he only drinks water from his cup, so there's not a concern about his teeth rotting out of his head if he falls asleep with a cup in his mouth), so when I put him to bed, I let him keep his cup. Since I'm blogging about it, you've probably figured out that this was a bad idea.

Half an hour after I put Lucas to bed, he started crying loudly and calling for me. I went in and picked him up, and... he was drenched. Like, "just fell into the bathtub fully clothed" drenched. As was his bed. So apparently the whole "non-spill" thing was just a cruel hoax played on unsuspecting moms just for laughs. Any mom of a toddler (or former toddler) can tell you that there's no such thing as getting your child out of bed, changing his pajamas and diaper, changing his sheets, and then putting him back to bed and having him actually sleep. He ended up falling asleep a full hour and 45 minutes after his bedtime.

So I'm still in the market for new sippy cups for Lucas. In the meantime, hopefully I'm not screwing his teeth up. Although there's a good chance he'll inherit my teeth that required surgery and three years of braces before they looked semi-presentable, so he might be out of luck anyway.