Feeding

Formula is not sterile so that's why the water needs to be hot, but not boiling because the boiling water can kill some of the nutrients. I imagine that amount of water needs to be used due to the mineral content in water, but I am not sure. You should know now if your kid feeds every three or four hours so you can prepare a bottle 2.5 or 3 hours after a bottle so there is one ready. It is against guidelines but pretty much everyone I know made a few bottles together, cooled quickly then stuck in the fridge to be heated up when needed.

If you want to continue to be super strict:

Boil some water. Pour it into a sterile container. Let it cool. Then put it in the fridge. Use that to cool the freshly boiled water to 70. Add your formula. Shake it. Give it a minute then top up with more cooled water to get it to drinking temp.

There's a bit of finagling working out proportions as you need to bear in mind it's 30ml/scoop not 30ml with a scoop in the bottle but it can be done.

Or you can do what most parents do and make the days bottles up the night before, following the directions and putting them in the fridge when done. Sit them in a bowl of hot water to heat.

I always put them straight in the fridge.

Not putting hot food straight in the fridge is outdated provided you’re not putting huge volumes in at very high temps.

Old fridges were slow to cool food so hot food warmed them up and risked spoiling all your food. Modern fridges are better and the fridge will cool the warm food before anything else warms up. (Unless you’re putting in huge volumes of piping hot food)

https://www.aarp.org/home-garden/housing/info-02-2010/myth_buster_should_you_let_hot_food_cool_before_refrigerating_.html

(The reason I said to let the boiling water cool before the fridge in my first post was about the need to put a lid on it. A lid on a litre of boiling water cooling in a fridge will cause issues unless there’s a release on it to let air in)

You can make up a few bottles at once, cool them and straight in to fridge and use them within 24 hours. Just heat up as needed then in hot water.
You must use hot water in with the formula, not cool water,as formula is not sterile and the water needs to be at least 70 degrees to kill off any bacteria in the formula.
Cooled water or cold water will not do this. Hence why you let the water boil and then cool for 30 mins to get to the correct temp to kill the bacteria.

As others said the instant bottles worked well for us rather than formula and making them up.

Also do whatever is best for the little one and keeps the parents sane. I'm sure you are doing a great job.

Paul Pogba wrote: »

Instructions say to boil 1 litre and let it rest for half an hour before making the bottle and then cool it. Water temp needs to hit at least 70 degrees. I don’t understand the whole boiling a litre of water to make 60ml bottles and waiting 30 minutes. ... Basically I feel boiling a litre of water is a waste, waiting 30 minutes to let it cool from 100 degrees is more time wasted when it only has to hit 70 to kill germs/bacteria.

Can't quite believe that this advice hasn't been updated and clarified in the twenty years since I discussed it with the NCT in the UK (wonder if I still have the e-mail where they replied with an "oh ... yeah ... you've got a point ... we must correct that on the website ...")

Anyway, that 1-litre requirement is there because all the baby-milk marketeers and legal advisors are lazy. Here's the science:
- There is a very small risk that formula milk powder may contain harmful bacteria.
- To limit their numbers (note: limit them, not kill them) the mixture must be heated up to at least 70°C.
- Under laboratory conditions, where the units are always standardised, 1 litre of water boiled to 100°C will remain above 70°C for 30 minutes.
- That 30 minute deadline is the maximum time you should wait, assuming you're boiling your kettle of precisely 1000ml in lab with a controlled ambient temperature ... :rolleyes:

- In practice, in a domestic kitchen, just about every parent fails to make up formula correctly, for one simple reason: as soon as you add the formula to the cooling water, it drops the temperature to below 70°C and has no effect on the bacteria it's supposed to be killing. The only way to avoid this is to use the hot water within a few minutes of boiling it. The quantity boiled is irrelevant for single bottles; it is somewhat more important when making up a batch, but again, the powder should be hitting the last bottle by the 30th minute at the latest (if you're going to obsess over temperatures).

- Side note: your water may boil at more or less than 100°C depending on what altitude you live at, what salts are in the water, what type of thermostat is fitted to the kettle and where the sensor is located in relation to the water ...

The good news is that the formula manufacturers (and baby organisations like the NCT) know perfectly well that these time and temperature instructions are essentially useless, so they are very careful make the manufacturing as safe as possible, so the risk of bacterial contamination is negligible. There is considerably more risk of contamination from whatever's floating around in the kitchen at the time you're making up the bottles, from the cold water you use to cool the mixture, or indeed, from poorly washed bottles and teats or if you have a habit of dunking a wet scoop into the tin.

If you have no bottles made up and a hungry baby, as long as you've got a clean bottle available, you can prepare a feed in 5 minutes.

Just make the minimum amount on the machine and feed the baby the required amount and dump the rest. It's a little wasteful but it will save you so much time

On our first baby we would boil 1L water, cool for 30 mins, add required water to 6 bottles, add formula, sit them in a shallow basin of cold water to cool then put in the fridge and reheat as required. PHN told us that adding the formula too quickly could kill some of the nutritional content of the powder, adding it too slowly would mean the temperature wouldnt kill all bacteria present in the powder. Painful if the 30 min cooling period was missed. Painful trying to heat a bottle in the middle of the night with a screaming baby.

We were gifted a Perfect Prep a few weeks in and it was a life saver. If I were you I would make the smallest setting 4oz bottle and then dump the unused milk, it wont be long until baby is drinking 4oz so it wont be wasteful for too long.

Ready made milks are handy but need to be discarded once open 24 hours so if you go down that route buy smaller sizes to split rather than a big 1L bottle as you won't get through that in 24 hours just yet. Also worth noting that the ready made ones can be expensive and they can also have a different taste. A friend of mine was combination feeding and her son would only drink the ready-made bottles alongside her breastmilk, if she was exclusively formula feeding that would have been a very expensive way to do it. Powdered formula is expensive enough so we only used ready-made when out and about for longer than 2 hours and they were often refused unless baby was really hungry as she didn't like the taste difference.

Hi OP congrats on the baby. I remember those long nights all too well. We went through kilos of chocolate biscuits waiting for the kettle to cool! I'd second the recommendation to try pre made. It's more expensive but definitely worth it for the short period. Just bear in mind I think the composition differs slightly to keep it preserved. Ours never had a problem switching between the two though. We also found it helpful for when we were out and about. Best of luck.

I'll probably be shot but here is what I do and it works great for us. I have a 3 year old that I haven't killed and a 7 month old that has never been sick.
I fill the kettle with fresh water and boil. I wash the bottles and put in the sterliser and once the sterliser is finished I give it a few mins so bottles aren't to hot to handle and I pour the required amount of water into the required number of bottles for the day and I leave them on the counter top in our kitchen. I fill out powder container with the number of scoops of powder. Both our babies had reflux so I added baby gavison to the bottles and shake until dissolved and then add the powder and also shake to dissolve. I never heated bottles as my 2 drank them at room temperature as they did in the hospital with the small bottles that they provide so never saw the point in heating them and it has worked great for us and it is handy when out and about as you don't have to heat bottles.

I know this is against advise but I also know another few families that do this and all kids have been fine. Find something that works for you on your child and once you and they are happy and not sick thats all that matters.

Congrats by the way