It’s so hard to figure out what baby/toddler products you are going to need and/or like best. And which ones look good, but totally suck. We’ve found quite a few of those. Some suck so bad that we’ve actually shelled out more money to buy replacements in the hopes that they won’t suck too, or at least suck a little less.

Our first fail was the kitchen cabinet locks. We had the ones that went around the two knobs and sort of zip tied them together. Every time we needed to go in the cabinet it was a hassle to open them which made you keep them off until you were done doing whatever you needed to do in the cabinet. That’s when Joey would make a beeline straight for the cabinet because he knew it was unlocked (babies are smarter than we think). Plus they were an eyesore and I wanted my kitchen to look nice. That’s when we found these locks.

They go on the inside of the cabinet door so you can’t see them. They are magnetic so you simply hold a magnet over the outside of the cabinet directly over where the lock is located inside the cabinet to unlock it. When you remove the magnet, the lock automatically re locks itself. The locks come with the magnet as well as a magnetic circular disk with an adhesive backing to stick onto the inside of a higher up cabinet. This is where you store the magnet.

Next up are our baby gates. We currently have these gates from Safety First.

There are both positive and negatives to these gates. Initially we bought these gates because my husband still has two of them from when my stepson was a baby (he’s now 11), and we really liked them. They are extremely sturdy and they snap in and out of the doorway without a problem. The new version of the gates, however, we have found are not like the old ones. They are not as sturdy so they give you a hard time to snap them in, and when you remove them, they either mark up the wall or take the paint right off! Because of this, we’ve been climbing over the gates instead of removing them every time we go in and out. This was not a comfortable thing to do when I was pregnant and it’s not easy for my parents either when they babysit. Since we will be using baby gates for many years to come we will now be investing in these gates.

Even though they need to be screwed into the doorway, you only make holes where the screws go and you only have to fix the door frame once when you take them down. But I will say, if you need gates that you can travel with (take to grandmas house, a summer house, etc.) and don’t want to use anything permanent, then these are a good pick. They are also good if you have a lot of rooms/stairways that you want to restrict and you don’t want to invest in a ton of gates, then you can easily move these from one room to the next.

Lastly, our bottle warmer will be getting the boot as well. There’s quite a few things we don’t like about it. First of all, there’s no specific settings, only a dial. And nothing indicates how hot it makes the bottle depending on where you set the dial. We feel like it’s a gamble every time you heat one up (of course always test the milk/formula on your hand before giving it to your baby). But what we really HATE about our bottle warmer is that there is no automatic turn off switch. If you forget to turn it off, which is easy to do when you have a screaming, hungry baby waiting for their bottle, the water in the warmer will eventually evaporate, leaving nothing in it and could cause a fire. We have accidentally left it on many times and were very lucky that we noticed it was still on before we had a real problem. We will be purchasing this bottle warmer as a replacement.

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