Still Buying Disposable Water Bottles? Here, One Mom’s Tricks for Ditching Them

Unless you’re hosting your kiddo’s party in a forest or an outhouse, running water is probably available. Use it to fill small paper cups. Bonus points if you bring your Brita to the toddler gym or ceramics studio. Or instead of offering the standard goody bag full of choking hazards, set the table with reusable stainless steel water bottles and send each kid home with one.

Don’t leave the frigging reusable water bottles on the kitchen island (like I recently managed to do before a recent family vacation to Mexico). This Brita Filtering Water Bottle would have come in handy—it has an enclosed straw and one-handed push-button lid so nobody is swallowing sand, and its leakproof lid means it won’t dribble all over your beach bag, waterlogging your magazines. Bring your tots’ bots to amusement parks, sporting events and movie theaters too. Even if you can’t enter with them filled, you can always empty them out and refill them at a water fountain.

Before hitting the road, fill some reusable water bottles using a Brita water pitcher outfitted with a Brita Longlast filter—it reduces chlorine taste and odor, and removes 99 percent of lead, with a special activated carbon filter than prevents those little black flakes from escaping. You also won’t need to worry about plastic molecules floating in their water, which can happen when single-use water bottles are left in the car on warm days (another reason not to keep a case of them in your trunk).

Stow a backup reusable bottle in your gym bag or locker for those times when you forget your usual sipper. Wash it thoroughly at least once a week to keep the scuzzies away.