About glass bottles and such - Part I

One piece of sage advice I received from parents of HOMs and my friends was to try a variety of bottles before purchasing a large quantity because babies don't always take to whatever brand the parents may prefer.

This turned out to be so true. Our girls were fed breast milk from Similac one-time use bottles in the NICU and are now used to those latex nipples. I have been trying various bottles in search of similarly shaped and sized nipples - with a flow that is on par - that they would transition to.

We are ultimately planning to buy 27 bottles: 3 babies x 8 bottles per day, plus one "spare" set, to enable us to wash bottles only once per day. BB asked how we go about cleaning the glass bottles and I'll get to that in Part II.

Everyone also advised us to skip the smaller 4oz bottles (or buy only a few) and go straight to 8oz bottles. Since we're still in the "test driving bottles" phase, we haven't fully committed to a brand yet, but I'm leaning towards the Munchkin glass bottles.

Fortunately, the nipples and rings we received from the NICU fit on the BPA-free plastic Medela bottles (used for pumping) as well as Munchkin glass bottles and vice versa. The Similac one-time use bottle nipples and rings also fit onto the Snappie bottles the NICU provided me with for pumping and freezing breast milk.

I like the Munchkin bottles for several reasons: I have been trying to use less plastic (yes, even the BPA-free kind), the curved shape of the Munchkin bottles make them easier to hold than other glass bottles on the market, the silicone sleeve covers the bottle better than some of the other brands, and the shape of the nipples match what my kids are now used to. My husband dropped one of the Munchkin glass bottles from hip height onto a hardwood floor before we had a chance to put the silicone sleeves on. Miraculously it didn't shatter or crack. We may not be so lucky next time, so we promptly covered them all with silicone sleeves. We battled to get the silicone sleeves onto the bottles, but I'm willing to deal with that nuisance.

We have also tried Avent bottles (they leaked), Playtex Drop-Ins (the nipples didn't work for my babies, the liners are expensive, and it was a hassle to use these bottles for small amounts of milk). You need to push the milk into the nipple to have the benefit of the bottles reducing gassiness. With the girls still not drinking that much in one go and falling asleep easily during feeds, it required us to reposition the baby and then use two hands to squeeze the air out of the little drop-in bag. Repeat this a few times with each baby, plus the fact that you need to get ALL the air out until milk flows through the nipple (messy) and you have a sense of why this just wasn't worth the hassle.

I've heard great things about the Dr Brown's glass bottles, but parents of multiples have told me that they're a pain in the neck to assemble because they have more pieces.

I'm sure there are other brands we could be trying, so if you have a suggestion for glass bottles or other tips on this topic, I'm all ears.