Cleaning Baby’s Bottles

Being a mother to a beautiful baby girl for over a year now has made me learn a couple of things, the more important ones being learning how to make use of our money well and how to have patience with her. This can only be understood by mommies just like me or those people who are raising kids not their own such as aunts or grandmas. I’m also the youngest among five siblings which makes me the aunt to, I think that’s about nine kids now.

Before I got married and had a child of my own, I was always asked to babysit my older brothers and older sister’s kids. This was not something I loved most because babies and toddlers can get really tiring for a while, especially when I had to babysit them for a month straight (that’s what my sister always made me do). The thing that also made me cringe at times was because my sister wouldn’t let me go out with my girlfriends at night so that the following day I would have been well-rested to watch over her kids. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t making a slave out of me or something like that. She was taking up baking lessons at the time, and me being single and done with school, was the only available ready help at hand.

These experiences with kids has helped in the “training” that I sort of underwent into becoming a mother myself today. But what I loved the most with my role as a nanny back then was making sure that the stuff of the kids were clean. I finished with a Degree in Nursing, and when you study nursing, you practice what you learned at school even outside hospital duty.

I love washing their clothes, with my bare hands at that. I also loved washing their baby bottles. The thing I liked least was changing dirty diapers.

Anyhow, now that I’m a mother, I’m keener on learning how to care more for the baby and her needs. What I am very cautious about is the baby’s health. I make sure that her things are clean, immaculate if they can be. Aside from learning to meet her needs, I also try to find ways to do so without going overboard on our budget.

This simple and very cheap tip I learned from my brother through his baby’s pediatrician is this: clean baby’s bottles using salt. Yes, salt! Just a pinch and add about an ounce of water. What I do is rinse the bottle first and make sure that every part is properly run with water. After that I put the pinch of salt inside the bottle, add water, and mix it for about ten seconds. I rinse that off and place it in my Chicco Sterilizer (which can sterilize up to 8 bottles at a time).

Salt is very cheap and widely available, so it’s very helpful to our budget. With my husband the sole breadwinner for our small family, I try my best to do my part by helping him make the most out of his income. Salt for my baby’s bottle as a cleaner has proven to be effective. But I always make sure that her bottles are sterilized properly.

Aside from Chicco Sterilizer, I would also recommend Philips AVENT Electric Steam Sterilizer

My baby bottles are all AVENT. The price might be a bit high but it's really worth it.