A little while ago a friend of mine posted a question on facebook asking for some advice on how long you should sterilise baby bottles and feeding equipment. She had numerous responses, those sort of questions do on facebook don’t they? I thought id ask the lovely parent bloggers on twitter what they would all do or had done and they all said about 12 months or until the baby could move around and pick stuff up.
My response went down with a little bit of a shock for some people. See, after our first baby we didn’t sterilise anything. AT ALL.
My babies have all been breastfed but we have always given bottles as well, usually of expressed milk or formula. Generally once a day in order to give me a bit of rest. My OH would do the late evening feed with a bottle and then mama would be getting a little bit extra kip and do the night time feeds, which (chipping into baby nurse mode) is always one of the best feeds to stick with as your hormone levels are higher at this time of day (which..ahem is sort of unfair if you ask me).
But thats digressing..
….so we usually would only have one or two bottles a day and the hand breast pump to use daily.
At the end of the day all of the things were washed in hot soapy water with a bottle brush and then put in the dishwasher…and thats what we did…with every single baby.
Now I realise that, that might sound radical and scary to some who are worried about bacteria, infections, high temps BUT we didnt make the decision to do this based on entirely no thought.
If you have been here before you may know that I have been a staff nurse on a large Neonatal unit for a number of years (thats sick and premature babies) and for our pre-term babies who aren’t old enough to suckle we ask their mama’s to express milk for them, which is stored and given to them as they need it.
We dont sterilise the expressing sets we give to the mums. They are taught good hand washing and how to wash the sets effectively with detergent. But that is all. This process has always been sanctioned by a micro-biologist (just in case you wanted to know!). Also I donated expressed milk to our local milk bank ( just call me Daisy) and they also did not recommend sterilising. Again just hot soapy water and a thorough clean.That milk is obviously pasteurised before it is used but it is screened for bugs before that process.
This reason and also a conversation i had with a friend who is a phd in microbiology who said something along the lines of ‘it is totally laughable that ten minutes in a steamer can be deemed as sterilised!’ made me re-evaluate why we were actually sterilising our stuff.
So we stopped and got a little bit of time back, which is really important in our house and we have had 5 very healthy, thriving babies. Four of which have never had anything that has been sterilised.
Thats my theory, i wouldn’t have said it was that radical, i think the response i got on facebook seemed to suggest that it was maybe a little. Im not saying that we shouldn’t recommend that parents sterilise for young babies but its important to realise that a steriliser doesn’t actually ‘clean’ a bottle!
Funnily enough though a friend of mine who has moved to Australia chipped to the little conversation on fb saying that there they don’t recommend sterilising either. So it would seem that im not altogether alone…
🙂
What do you think? what did you do? What will you do?
and just because here is a seriously cute little babba…
GIVEAWAY TIME!!
This week as its a baby theme I am doing a giveaway of one of these fabulous Lamaze developmental play toys. We had one of these for my last baby and she loved it. So if you would like to win one of these cute little toys for your little one, please fill in the rafflecopter and away you go!
the winner of the fabulous Cakedays book by the Hummingbird bakery is Gemma from Helloitsgemma. Congratulations! Give me a shout!
