Glass Feeding Bottles, or what goes around comes around!

"BladeAnnie" my granddaughter was tongue tied but she breastfed fine after it was cut. My daughter breast fed her for over a year.

I still have the glass boat shaped bottle from which he fed. when he was four months old. I breast fed him until he was getting fatter and I was getting thinner. He is now 70.
It was easy to clean with a bottle brush and then pour boiling water through it.
nowadays every thing is too sterile. So no immunity is developed.

Beast is best. It's a proven fact. Another is that there's a definite lack of support for nursing mothers with lip tie and tongue ties being undiagnosed too. It's not for everyone though.
I remember the bottles because my Mom tried to get one for me when I was little. Apparently I was an appallingly bad feeder. She tried everything.

I used a combination of terry nappies and pocket washable nappies on my two.
I'm glad I kept them.

Another 'breast is best apparatchick here', water or breast for the first year of both DDs, never sterilised anything, didn't even boil terries. They've both survived!

I would just like to point out that in my childhood feeding bottles though glass were straight and cleaned with a bottle brush before being boiled up. Teats were rubber and couldn't be boiled but the clinics handed out a disinfectant they were put into after being rinse well in plenty of clean water.

If you can breast feed it provides immunity from various illnesses, but not all women can, so I hope you all bite your tongues when talking to a mother who would dearly love to feed her baby herself, but cannot.

sarahhelenwhitney

I got the princely sum of £3 for the baby bottle, including the rather tatty box it came in! Hardly Antiques Roadshow, but hey, I wonder what was paid for it originally?

Breast fed my daughter religiously....she was the most fractious...irritable ...non-sleeper of a child! She later went on to develop extremely bad asthma ...has been on permanent steroids since three years old..!! When my son was born 4 years later I thought that if he was going to be the same I was going to bottle feed and at least could hand him to somebody else and get a little rest this time round! I bottle fed.... he was a totally happy...healthy ...peaceful...unflappable baby, He fed well...he slept well, and followed the baby book almost like he had read it!! He’s seen a doctor three times ...at 3 years old ( stomach ache)...at 13 ( glandular fever) and at 38( tonsils).... he’s 39 now.....and no sign of the asthma that has followed his breast fed sister through her life. All kids are different.

On the subject of old fashioned bottles. I have a huge wooden clothes peg, think it was used for pegging out woollen blankets. Apparently they were also used as a 'dummy' before all the commercial ones came out. A teat from a bottle was just fitted on the end of the clothes peg and the baby sucked away. So much for hygiene but then wood is supposed to be self cleaning.

GrandtanteJE65

I was one of those mothers that would have breastfed my babies had I been able to. My firstborn (in 1990) was at a time when breast is best was very much the thing you had to do! Sadly I never produced milk despite drugs, pumps etc and had to give up feeling a complete failure. My second born in 1992 was exactly the same. I should have guessed it wasn't going to happen as I wore the same size bra throughout both pregnancies and never had a growth spurt following their births either.
I do agree that breast is best but I didn't have a choice and was devastated. It annoys me still that the same opinion rules above any alternative option.

I felt that I had a real battle on my hands when I decided to breast feed my firstborn. It was as if our whole UK culture was set against it forty years ago. If I hadn't been so stubborn about it I would certainly have failed. I was also scared he'd be allergic to formula.

After my emergency cesarean, my husband had to insist that our son wasn't given a bottle, despite a recorded family history of severe cow's milk and soya allergies. There was no safe formula for him available there anyway. The nurses wanted to take him off to the nursery so I'd get a 'good sleep' but, (by then) lacking trust, we just had to refuse.

Newborns need feeding every two hours and at least once in the night. That's normal yet they said he was 'unsettled'. He lost weight in the first week, again perfectly normal, and they stressed about it. I think they were so used to the sleepy, dozy, bottle-fed infants (like that due to difficulties with digestion) that they viewed his alertness as odd and alarming.

Later, the tut tutting and odd stares I got when feeding in public were quite surprising. A pram sheet over my shoulder and front meant nothing was visible yet it was viewed as unusual/unacceptable behaviour, very strange.

The health visitor suggested 'topping him up' with special formula (even though he had gained reasonable weight) due to his wakefulness. He's never needed much sleep, then or since. Yes, I was exhausted and in pain for a few months but I coped well enough.

Of course, with the other three it was a complete breeze. By then, I knew the ropes, had confidence and found it all very convenient, especially the lack of expense, natural losing of pregnancy weight and ability to go out and about with just a few extra clothes and nappies. Thankfully, the daytime feeds were dropped well before they started talking (and asking for it in public). I fed them until they were two, then considered weird, but now recommended.

I'm another who sterilised bottles etc in the pressure cooker - never used any chemicals for sterilising things.

Teats were turned inside out if possible and rubbed with salt to make sure that I got any little bits of milk out of the crannies.

One of the most disgusting things that I've ever seen was the inside of 'the drinking valve' of a 'sippy cup', where the mother had never realised that it should be removed and thoroughly cleaned every time the cup was used. It had been used to give drinks of water, milk, tea and fruit juice - the valve was full of slimy gunge !

I stopped sterilising spoons, bowls etc. when, one day, I looked down at my baby crawling through the kitchen after our three cats and the dog. Suddenly, common sense kicked in and hand washing and floor mopping were the important things!

Re terry nappies----there was a service around here when my GCs were small where terry nappies were provided, for a fee, the soiled nappies were put into a bin which was collected and fresh, boiled nappies delivered. It worked very well and worked out cheaper than buying disposables, and reduced landfill.

chicken

We used to call those diaper services. ("Nappies" are termed "diapers" in North America.) I've never actually seen one, nor did my mother used one (she used cloth with all of us) but I have heard of them before.

Gosh, I remember glass bottles for younger siblings!
Also those tins of National Dried Milk - I don't suppose I'm the only one old enough!!

Hetty, my first was born in 1977 - I was in hospital for a week and there was never the slightest pressure to bottle feed.
I was probably lucky in that I had no problems with BF-ing though, and that was in the days of 4 hourly feeds - 6, 10, 2, 6, 10, 2.
My dd seemed quite happy with it.

TBH I do sometimes wonder whether at least some of the trouble mothers have with BF-ing nowadays, esp. sore nipples, is that the babies seem to be almost permanently plugged in, so it's not usually a case of having a really good feed and then nodding off.
My mother used to say, 'Fill them up and they'll sleep' but maybe she was just very lucky with her 4, too.

My mother used a National Dried Milk tin to keep her flour in well into the 70s!

My Aunt used to tell us about the banana-shaped bottles she used for our cousins (who were 15 years older than us) but I've never seen one.

I would love to test those fancy bottles but I have a question. How are you supposed to find a suitable bottle warmer for these? Why not get something mentioned here as the best baby bottle warmer? Or this exotic bottle itself should be bundled with a warmer.

Interesting discussions here. I breastfed all 5 of mine, without any problems but 3 of them moved on to bottles eventually, and I had a glass bottle with a screw on top, so it was easy to use and clean. The 3rd child was rather attached to his bottle, but when he was around 2 it got broken. We decided he was old enough to stop using anyway, and for a few days he would say a bit sadly “bockle boken” ?, but got over it quickly.

I agree with Witzend that nowadays the on-demand feeding seems to have got out of hand. I did feed more frequently with 1st but with the subsequent ones I managed to stretch the intervals between feeds, and they fed better and slept longer.

My eldest is 53 and I was an object of curiosity in the ward , midwives came and stared as I insisted on breast feeding

I remember struggling with those teats jaylucy almost in tears when the bottle of milk shot out of my hands onto the floor.
Bottle warmers KitKatt ? There's a new fangled idea

And our babies' terry nappies are making a come back, hailed as wonderful environment friendly items! Do they still sell Napisan?

Oh those buckets of nappies I remember them well

My daughter uses washable nappies, not the terry squares but shaped ones with Velcro fastening. The recommendation she was given with them was not to soak, just put in lidded bucket - wash when bucket full. No Napisan!

Was watching the BBC program Hidden Killers and one of the episodes had the old bottles-