Sterilizing
-Step one: after your baby has finished her bottle, and burped, put her down somewhere safe and go straight to the kitchen. Rinse the bottle under the tap, fill with 1-2 oz of water, screw the lid back on and shake. Tip the dirty water out and fill the bottle again and put it on the side. This makes things MUCH easier later when you're actually sterilizing. Especially if your baby is on SMA milk. SMA is a very thick and greasy milk. It makes the bottles hard to clean, and if they aren't cleaned properly, they will get stained a horrible colour. We are on cow and gate and she poops much more regularly than she did on SMA, she found it very difficult to process and would scream a lot when she had to poop. Cow and gate is also easier to clean off the bottles, and much less greasy and thinner. Cow and gate is frothier and may sometimes leave bubble residue, this is fairly east to get off though.
-Step two: when you have enough bottles to fill your sterilizer, wash them. You don't have to use a bottle brush, especially with nice wide bottles like tommee tippee, but it can help and some come with a handy teat cleaner. You can wash the bottles in hot soapy water like the rest of your washing up. Precautions I take to make sure my baby isn't going to get anything nasty in her food are: -make sure they are the first things you wash up in a clean bowl of water - get a new washing up cloth every single time (normally once a day, in the evening, so you might want to make sure you have at least 7 washcloths. It can then be used on the rest of your washing up no problem.) Because you rinsed the bottles out earlier, all they will need is a wipe over with the cloth, inside and out.
-Step three: I don't think this is mandatory, but I do it every time. Finish whatever washing up you need to do, tip the water away. Rinse the bowl out, and refill with hot water, nothing else. Tip all your bottles, teats and lids back in to the bowl, and swish them all around, getting all suds off the bottles.
-Step four: Now's the easy bit. You shove them all in the sterilizer and shove it on. For my avent this is just fill it with 200ml water, and press a button. Others might be more complicated I'm not sure.
Sterilizing is one of the things that I actually agree with them being militant about. It is very important, you don't want your baby to be having anything they shouldn't have. And you have to do this roundabout once a day. Every day. It can be a struggle, but you WILL get used to it and it WILL become routine. You have to continue sterilizing for a long time, around six months, maybe a bit earlier. Basic guide is, when they're reaching out, picking things up for themselves, and putting them in their mouth, you no longer have to sterilize everything. I think this will be around the time they sit up, but my little one hasn't got there yet so I don't know.
Read the instructions, but my steam sterilizer doesn't need cleaning. Only when it gets gunk in it coming up from the bottom, which is about once every two months maybe, with daily use. Microwave sterilizers get gunk on them quite a lot, and need a thorough clean, or at least a wipedown with a cloth, every couple of weeks. My microwave sterilizer is a tommee tippee, and can fit two big bottles, complete with teats AND lids, which can be good if you need them quickly, or 3 small bottles with teats and lids. I got my tommee tippee microwave sterilizer free with my tommee tippee manual breast pump, which also came with a bottle.
Note: I do not recommend manual breast pumps. A double electric pump is something that you really do need to spend money on, if you're pumping. Sometimes you can get more milk out by hand expressing than with a manual pump, and it's boring and slow.
however, if you are pumping, all the components for my double pump fit pretty perfectly in the tommee tippee microwave sterilizer, I don't know if they would fit so well in a big steam sterilizer.
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