I’m a New Parent and This Affordable Kitchen Tool Is a Game-Changer

When my wife Andrea and I told our friends and family we were pregnant and planning to give birth to our son Leo where we live in Oaxaca, Mexico, they gifted us all the things they thought we’d need to survive having a newborn. One of the fanciest gifts was an automatic formula preparer sold by a well-known brand.

Even though it dispenses into each bottle precisely the right amount of formula and water, it doesn’t blend it together. Every two hours, like clockwork, we’d find ourselves standing in our kitchen, bleary-eyed and exhausted, struggling with a clumpy bottle.

How a Cheap Milk Frother Instantly Made Life Easier

One morning, somewhere between the hours of 1 and 3 a.m., desperate for a solution to the dreaded lumps, I suddenly remembered our Milk Boss handheld milk frother. It was a gift from the same friends who had given us the formula machine, and, realizing that formula is basically just milk, I popped the frother into Leo’s bottle and was thrilled to discover it blitzed away our problem. In moments, I had a nice, smooth bottle of formula for my hangry baby.

We Take It Everywhere We Go

Now we carry this small, lightweight, and inexpensive kitchen tool everywhere. We’ve prepared bottles with it in parks and restaurants, in our car, and even on airplanes. It’s so compact that it easily fits into a small pocket in our diaper bag, and the two AA batteries that power it last a surprisingly long time. While we own a Milk Boss, any brand of frother in this style will do.

Not everyone was immediately impressed with my newfound parenting hack. Our nanny Liz, who comes from coastal Oaxaca, looked at me as I prepared a bottle one morning and said dryly in Spanish, “You know, in Mexico we just shake the bottle.”

And yeah, I’ll sheepishly admit, she has a point. You don’t need a milk frother to prepare a bottle of formula for your baby. But a day or two later, I spied her using it to make one of Leo’s bottles with a skeptical look on her face, and now, two months later, not a day goes by that she doesn’t use it herself.

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