January 13, 2015 - Learn to heat up a bottle

Acceptable for warming a bottle, right?

As I've been doing my research to prepare for Nugget's arrival, I've learned a lot of things.  One thing that has come clearly into focus is that he is going to be eating (and pooping) a lot.  He comes by this naturally, as I have a pretty large appetite, and I know that babies need this amount of fuel because of the tremendous amount of growth that is taking place in those formative years.  So I can't begrudge him the fact that the way that I look at it, he will be eating me out of house and home soon after his arrival (Sorry, Mom and Dad, I now realize that all those comments about having a "hollow leg" were not in jest, but were actually concerns that I was resembling a plague of locusts).

Nugget is going to need to eat a lot, and this means that he will also not be constrained by the whole "My parents are asleep" idea.  If he needs to eat, he will let us know this, most likely in the form of crying or screaming.  I'm thinking Rock, Paper, Scissors should do the trick for who's turn it is to feed him (I say this knowing that it will be my turn pretty much always).

I have a cursory knowledge of babies, and I know that their bottles are stored in the fridge and are needed to be heated to room temperature before they can be consumed.  What I didn't know before last night was how exactly to do this.  I set about to change that.

The first step was to sterilize the bottle that I was using.  I did this, according to it's instructions, by putting the bottle, nipple, and cap in a pot of boiling water for 5 minutes.  I then dumped the water and let the bottle dry and cool down.

Cooling...

According to my handy dandy instructions that came with my bottle, you are not supposed to microwave breast milk or formula because this can lead to uneven heating.  The same can be said of putting the bottle in boiling water.  Another risk of doing both of these is that the bottle can warp and leech into the milk.  Wonderful, because I didn't have enough to worry about with all of this.  Instead, it recommended that I put the bottle in warm water and wait for it to get to room temperature.  I set my watch, from the time I hit the kitchen with no pot of water ready, and started the process.

A watched bottle never warms...

After what seemed like an eternity, I tested it on my wrist to make sure of the temperature.

Success!

 What I found was that it took a lot longer than I thought it would.  From start to finish, it took around 10 minutes to get the whole thing warmed.  This included getting a pot down, filling it with water, warming said water, and then putting the bottle in the water and waiting for it to warm.  This is disheartening because I know that things can get hairy in the wee small hours of the morning.  What's going to happen when Nugget wakes up in the middle of the night wailing for a late night/early morning snack? How am I going to get this done quicker, so he's not left in the lurch?

To anyone out there reading this, I'd appreciate some help and advice. Are bottle warmers worth buying?  Do they really save that much time, or is the heating up in warm water method a suitable alternative and I just need more practice at it?  Did I just do something wrong?

Help me, readers, you're my only hope!