morning mummies
re: travelling and sterilizing
if baby is above 1 yr old, can just use hot soapy water to wash the bottles and then use hot boiling water to pour over. no need to bring sterilizer for holidays.
but need to bring bottle wash and sponge. also bring some instant cereal sachets, or bottled baby food.
day to day sterilizing
if fully bottle feeding, buy at least 6 bottles, as nb feed almost every 2 hours, and some take a long time to feed, so if let's say bb takes 30min to feed, you only have 1.5hr to wash/sterlize before the next feed starts all over again.
and frankly u will be so tired that you rather use the time to rest or catch up with the rest of the chores.
with 6 bottles, wash after every feed, sterlise when using the 6th bottle so that by late afternoon time, you will have 6 fresh bottles to last you the night feeds and next day morning - early afternoon feeds. you can leave the sterlized bottled in the sterlizer for as long as 6-12 hrs as long as you take out the items using the tongs instead of your hands to avoid contamination.
it's better to use bb bottle & nipple wash to wash bottles and feeding related items as normal dish washing liquid contains scents etc lemon, floral which are too strong for bb.
sterlizers are also easy to use - no need to keeo watch over a hot boiling pot, as it;s auto off. mummies with newborns will be tired and fatigued, so wld be more forgetful, so boiling over stove incur additional risks.
a warmer is useful if you often express BM, or if you have a baby that drinks very slowly, easier to warm up with timer so that you do not over warm up the milk and kill all the nutrients in BM. another method is just fill up a cup with hot water and put the bottle in.
for bottle brush
buy those sponge ones and not the plastic spikey ones, the plastic spikey ones tend to scratch the insides of the bottles which is not good as bottles deteriorate faster.