Breastpump Secrets (or: How To Reduce The Clutter)
A new parent's idea of excitement?
As some of you know, the SFParents have been trying to feed little B as much breast milk as possible, and since SFMom is not at home during the workweek, this means that a lot of pumping is going on.
There are plenty of great places to go to read about breastfeeding and so on, and I’m not here to tell our intrepid(?) readers about those. We have, however, stumbled across a few secrets that we haven’t read anywhere else.
We have a fairly common brand of breast pump (one of the Medela models). They come with lots of fun hoses, gaskets, and all sorts of other little parts that are used to pump the milk from mommy into a set of bottles that they provide. From there, you can transfer the milk to your “feeding system” (which is, for us, a set of BornFree bottles that the media scaremongers convinced us to buy), and then you stick the end result in your baby’s mouth.
This is all well and good, except that all of these little parts are supposed to be steam-sterilized after each use with some frequency†. SFBaby is now tossing back a good 25 oz of milk during the workday alone, and after a typical day of pumping and feeding, our “needs be sterilized” bowl would contain 9-10 bottles plus all of the random pumping parts.
SFDad was handling most of the bottle cleanings at night, and this maddening pile of bottle parts (see inset image) was getting to be bigger than SFBaby herself. Suddenly, we had a realization: what if we could simply pump the breastmilk straight into the feeding bottles rather than having to go through the puny Medela bottles? Of course, the necks of the bottles have different sizes, so we couldn’t attach our Medela breastpump to the BornFree bottle.
SFDad thought that there must surely be a solution for this somewhere, and sure enough, it turns out that someone more clever had already thought of this. You can get breastpump adapters that work with both Medela and BornFree products. (The BornFree site claims that they work with “most” breastpumps, but we can confirm that the Medela pump works fine.)
Now, we’re only dealing with cleaning 3 bottles a day instead of 10! There is much less to clean and nothing needs to be transferred from one set of bottles to another.
On a side note, as part of our same purchase, we got some “BornFree variable flow wide neck nipples” for our bottles, but those turned out to be a complete waste of money. The marketing copy for these nipples makes them sound like the best things since sliced bread (“recommended for babies of 3 months plus and combines Level 1, 2 and 3 in one nipple”) and this appealed to SFDad’s sense of minimalism.
What they forget to mention is that one controls the rate of flow by rotating the bottle in a specific position in front of your baby’s face. Held at one angle, the nipple provides the equivalent of a level 1 nipple (and a slow flow). If you accidentally rotate the bottle 45 or 90 degrees, the bottle will provide a Niagara Falls-esque level 3 flow rate instead.
As you might imagine, we have tried asking SFBaby to hold perfectly still while she drinks (rather than squirming around like a banshee), but thus far, she seems to be ignoring us…so we’re back to using regular level ‘X’ nipples now.
† 8/11/2008: One of our fantastic commenters pointed out that we probably don’t need to sterilize the stuff after every use. Oh yeah. I think we just saved ourselves a lot of work.
Tags: adapter, BornFree, breast milk, breast pump, breastpump, converter, Medela, nipples, variable flow
LOL!
I empathize completely (although we only sterilize once per week and haven’t had any problems – I thought sterilization only needed to occur after every use if you were using formula). I use the Medela disposable freezer storage bags to move milk to and from the office, and we use glass evenflo bottles that fit directly onto the pump (in 4 oz and 8 oz sizes!). We also had some microwave steamer bags for steaming stuff that we used early on – they were fabulous! Let me know if you figure out that squirming thing though – Katie is also a little wiggle monster. (my least favorite is when she is breastfeeding and suddenly wants to see what Papa is doing on the other side of the room…and takes me with her when she whips her head around..AHEM!).