Drinking glasses...the mother's dilemma

What is a mother to do?

It is virtually impossible keeping up with the ever-changing 'scientific' opinion of what is safe and what is not. Ages ago (like when we had our first child!) it was perfectly safe to drink out of just about anything, plastic or not. A few years ago, we were warned to get rid of all our plastic water bottles and replace them with polycarbonate (such as Nalgene). Shortly after, we found out that, too, was a big no-no, due to BPA.

We have two problems with drinking glasses in our family. First of all, with so many of us home all day, we can very quickly go through a lot of glasses. This problem we solved by getting every member a stainless steel water bottle that is filled and reused throughout the day. We drink water all day except for breakfast, when milk, juice or fruit smoothies are served. Since I like to keep the bottles for water only, I then had two choices, glass or plastic cups. Because scientists seem to find problems with plastic drinking glasses faster than new types can be invented, we settled on glass. Problem two is that we have ceramic tile in our kitchen and everything breaks on this floor. No kidding...even Corelle dishes! Nevertheless, off to the thrift store I went to collect 25-cent glasses, the strongest ones I could find.

These broke one by one very quickly -- many on our floor, some in our dishwasher and even some just being tipped over on our counter.

I got a fantastic tip to try using small jam jars as glasses! I love them. They are very sturdy, as they are meant to go in and out of boiling water and be reused over and over. They are also easily replaceable should one break. We have been using them for several weeks without a break thus far, though no one has dropped one on our floor, yet. The tip also came with a very handy side-tip which was to use wide elastics to label the cup with the child's name using a sharpie marker. These labels can withstand the dishwasher multiple times.

And...the best part of labelling the jar with the child's name is there is no argueing about whose cup is left on the table after table-clearing time! ;)