Useful Items for Your Baby (Part 2)

This article is the sequel from the previous post, Useful Items for Your Baby (Part 1)

Through these series of article, we want to share our experience about items that are quite useful for attending your baby from birth to 6 months old. Our hope, other family can avoid the same mistake we have, buying things for your baby base on trial and error.

Feeding Bottle

“The safe alternative for breast feeding.

We are not really into modern way of life, we are just an old fashioned family living in Indonesia. My wife still breast feed our baby, and we plan to give him breast feed until he is old enough to have his immune system to develop and inherited from my wife (not sure about the process, I will take a look of some references and write some information about it later). However, as alternative food, my baby also takes formula milk by bottle feeding. Therefore, my baby gets the best of both world, breast feeding by my wife plus the best bottled milk powder available in market.

We use several brands of feeding bottles since baby birth, like AVENT, PukuHouse, Pigeon, and Tommee Tippee. However, most of our bottle feeders are AVENT, and we use mostly this brand for every day use.

Why we choose this brand? Because they are simple, easy to use, and the nipple is made from silicone soft with natural shape. We have several bottles with different sizes. All nipples and bottles are fully interchangeable. It a very convenience, flexible and time-saving feature that this product has. One thing that we really like about AVENT bottles, their form-factor is huge compare to similar products in market. So, they are easier to be cleaned and sanitized after use.

Our elders told us, once we introduced bottle feeding to our baby, he / she would then reject any breast feeding attempt. One said that the taste of powdered milk was much better that breast milk, others said that the baby was reluctant to spent much effort sucking their mommy nipples while they could easily get nourishment from ‘easy to suck‘ plastic nipple. They said, it is known as ‘lazy baby‘. How can we feed our baby with both breast milk and bottled milk for months, without showing any negative response from our baby or being lazy?

To be honest, we do not know the correct answer. All we know, we only use slowest flow rate nipple available. The logic behind it is, the baby will suck harder when the flow of fluid is slow. Therefore, the baby will not get lazy. Our baby has to earn his meal, starting from his childhood.

Well, despite of what we have been written above, every bottle brand has its own advantages (as well as its flaws). You can choose what ever brand you want, as long as your baby enjoying their meal. We suggest to put bottle feeding and its accessories in your baby shopping list, even you are planning to breast feed your baby. Who knows, your baby needs more nourishment that what available from breast milk?

But remember, breast milk is always the best food for the baby!