Hacks From a NICU Mom

 

The Bottle Boil

Can we talk bottles?  Please tell me why no one has invented disposable baby bottles yet.   I can't even begin to tell you the amount of hours my sweet husband and I (mainly him..he's a keeper) have spent washing and sterilizing these darn things.  And who is this Dr.Brown, anyway!?  And why does his bottles have more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle?  Y'all-- these bottles are killing us!!!

My little One in Fifty Thousand gets weighed weekly to monitor his growth, so we have to keep track of how many ounces he's eating. We also fortify (add extra fat to his milk).  So even when I was giving him breast milk, we still had to use bottles.  

Bottles!  The cleaning and preparing of these darn things was taking over our lives.  My husband would frequently describe our bottle maintenance as 'oppressive'.  And he was right.  It was oppressive.  We were washing seven plus bottles a day, and their many accessories, by hand.  It was never ending.  The skin on my hands was actually cracking and pealing from our bottle maintenance.  We just knew there had to be a better way.

 Thanks to the help of my cousin-in-law, and father of four, we have learned the bottle boil.  And are using this hack to reclaim our evenings and weekends!  In your face Dr. Brown!

Here is what you do:  Get yourself a big pot that permanently lives on your stove.  Fill the pot with clean water.  After each feeding rinse out the bottle and all of it's many pieces, then place them in the pot.  Once the pot is full, boil it for 30 minutes.  Use a spaghetti strainer to drain the water.  And ta-da! There you have it. Clean bottles. You can even catch up on your DVR recordings while they boil.

So until someone on Shark Tank creates disposable bottles we are surviving by using the bottle boil.  How do you manage this daunting task?  Give the bottle boil a try.  Your hands will thank me!