Claire Ireland, 3, uses her dad’s creation, the Sippy Top, with her father, Brent Ireland, Lawrence, and her sister, Grace, 7. The product for parents on the go is a top that screws on to regular bottles and works like a sippy cup.

Claire Ireland, 3, uses her dad’s creation, the Sippy Top, with her father, Brent Ireland, Lawrence, and her sister, Grace, 7. The product for parents on the go is a top that screws on to regular bottles and works like a sippy cup.

If you’re a parent, there’s a great possibility you’ve been in Brent Ireland’s shoes.

Many times the Lawrence resident had been in public with his two daughters, only to realize he forgot to put a sippy cup in the diaper bag.

Brent Ireland, Lawrence, has created the Sippy Top, a plastic piece that screws on to regular bottles and works like a sippy cup.

Of course, his realizations normally occurred in the middle of a crying fit for something — anything — to drink … in a sippy cup.

Fast-forward a few years, and Ireland has what he thinks is the answer to that situation: the Sippy Top.

Basically, it’s a screw-on, sippy-style lid that promises to “turn any water bottle into a sippy cup.”

“I have two small girls … and I was constantly either leaving or forgetting the sippy cups, when my girls were like 1 or 2 or 3,” Ireland says. “You can’t just give a 1- or 2-year-old a water bottle. It just doesn’t work.”

The top retails for $4.99 and is for sale at Blue Dandelion, 841 Mass., The Toy Store, 936 Mass., Checkers Foods, 2300 La., and Hy-Vees in Lawrence, Topeka and the Kansas City area, but Ireland envisions them near the refrigerated beverages anywhere bottled water can be sold. The top fits on most water bottles. The ones it won’t fit on are those with shallower, smaller necks that people buy in bulk and have at home — where they also have their sippy cups.

The tops are reusable, dishwasher-safe on the top rack and produced in Kansas City. It took months to produce, from the original design to reaching store shelves as well as his Web site, www.thesippytop.com. Ireland left his advertising business behind to work on The Sippy Top full-time.

“I knew it was going to be an uphill battle,” he says. “But everybody I’ve talked to has been very receptive — they love the idea, and that helped me.”

Topeka mom Ester Carpenter has tried out The Sippy Top on her 22-month-old, William, and she loves it. She has had many instances just in the past month when the top has come in handy.

“Several times I have had to pick my son up from day care when it wasn’t originally my plan. Without this product, I have had straight 15 minutes of a screaming child, until we could get home and get a drink,” she says, adding that she usually has a water bottle in her car from the workday. “Other times we have left the sippy cup at a grandparent’s house and have tried to punch a hole in the top of a milk or a water from the quick shop, only to have William dump the whole thing on himself, soaking his clothes and car seat.”

Not only does she like it, but she says her son also enjoys the novelty of drinking from a grown-up bottle.

“He thinks he’s big time getting to drink out of a big-boy water bottle like mommy and daddy,” she says.