bottle it up

Warning: this post will be horrendously boring unless you have a teeny ounce of interest in baby bottles.

Among all of the questions I get from expecting mamas in Target's baby aisle(s), "Which bottles do you use?" is one of the most frequent. (Um, why did I never think to ask questions in the baby aisle when I was pregnant??) I really don't know why people ask me this but somewhere along this mama journey I'm on, I actually have developed a few "thoughts" on bottles. I'll keep it simple, promise.

My biggest gripe? Medela's bottles. Or maybe I should say any bottle that is "made" to go with the pump. I fell into that trap big time with Medela. Stocked up on a whole bunch of Medela brand bottles thinking they were just the ones that would fit the pump or that they were just somehow more fit for storing breastmilk. Made perfect sense at the time. How wrong I was! If you are considering a Medela pump... any standard bottle will fit the shield. In a pinch (when my sink was totally full of empty Medela bottles) I've used other standard neck bottles such as Dr. Browns and even the glass Munchkin bottles. Don't get me wrong, I love Medela, but their bottles are expensive and are certainly not the only shoe that fits. And if you use or received some wide neck brand bottles like, say, Avent... they make a piece that adapts the Medela shield to the Avent bottle.

My second biggest gripe? ... leaking. I LOVE wide neck bottles. For nursing and pumping I don't care, but when I'm mixing formula, wide-neck is what I want. (It's cleaner, plain and simple.) BUT... the Avent bottles, though I do love their wide necks and all of their cuteness (if you can even call a bottle "cute," anyway) leak like crazy if the collar isn't screwed on just so. This drives me CRAZY. Any kind of leakage drives me crazy because, really, who likes a sticky mess?

My favorite? Born Free. Hands down. And if I had to pick a very close second, it would be Dr. Browns. Both have venting systems. Dr. Browns is great with the pump (standard neck) and Born free is wonderful for formula (wide neck, my favorite). If I had to pick a winner I'd pick Born Free, hands down, every time. Never once had a leak, clean-up is fine and they've always been BPA-free. If we had money to blow and didn't already have dozens of other bottles, I'd stock my whole cupboard with them, I love them so much.

Well, now that my interest factor just decreased 2910831 points, I'll leave it at that. So, to my two readers who have asked me about this in recent weeks, I hope this is helpful. If nothing else, at least you are now a few wasted minutes closer to meeting that sweet little baby!