Infants and toddlers, so wonderful and adorable, are alas, total magnets for germs. They touch everything. They put their hands in their mouths (and other things) and then they touch everything again. Of course they can’t yet master good hand hygiene on their own, so parents and caretakers are always on high alert, constantly cleaning up, wiping down and doing whatever else they can to minimize their babies’ chances of encountering infectious bacteria.

But when you’re juggling children and other family and likely work — it’s really challenging to manage your baby’s hygiene along with virtually everything they come into contact with. There’s only so much you can do; and that’s okay, because kids are going to be exposed to germs no matter how pristine your household.

Germ exposure will happen anyway, but we can take precautions to minimize

“We’re not raising our children in bubbles,” says Dr. Shari Platt, chief of pediatric emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center tells NBC News Better. “A child will be exposed to bacteria when they’re in the outside world (and I’m a strong believer of getting your child outdoors and to experience other children). If they have healthy immune systems they should be able to fight average exposure.”

Still, Dr. Platt emphasizes, it’s important to keep everything as clean as you can to minimize unnecessary exposure to bacteria, which could prompt infection (though Platt says it’s almost impossible to determine when infections are the direct result of contact with everyday germs).

Here’s a list of the items you should be focusing on along with expert tips on how and when to clean them.

Bath toys and rubber toys

A new study by InsuranceQuotes.com tested (using gram and stain culture swab tests) common baby items (a bath toy, a teething toy, a stroller handle and a public diaper changing station) to learn what tended to be the germiest. Bath toys blew everything else out of the water, containing over 4.3 million colony-forming units (CFU) per square inch.