Room Temperature Bottle Feeding

[Steph1978]

Can anyone help?

Had my son 11 days ago and really struggled with breast feeding so after much deliberation, guilt and tears I decided to use formula. Currently, we are making the bottles up as directed with cooled boiled water and either adding in the formula when required or storing made up bottles in the fridge and then heating when required (which at 2am in the morning is a pain).

Does anyone give their baby room temperature bottles and are there any nasty side effects?

Your help would be greatly appreciated!

The important thing is that the water is hot when the powder goes into it - it has to be at least 70 degrees, which is about the temperature of a litre of water boiled and left in the kettle for 30 minutes. After that it's up to you (and your baby!) what temperature you feed it at.

If you store them in the fridge just make sure you flash cool them after making up hot, and store right at the back.

We accidentally gave DS ready made formula (from carton) straight from the fridge when he was less than a week old (thats middle-of-the-night sleep deprivation for you!) and he drank the lot. After that we just didn't bother heating anything beyond room temperature, though rarely gave it straight out of the fridge, and he was fine, no effects at all. Made life a whole lot easier!! :)

Congratualtions on your son :)

Thanks both for the advice.

Em3978 did you add the formula before or after cooling it and did you always store it in the fridge?

If you're really struggling (and can possibly afford the extra cost) then I would suggest getting the cartons for the middle of the night feeds, just for a few weeks until you're over the worst.
Unfortunately, whilst there's nothing wrong with a baby drinking a room temp feed per se, it should be made up with very hot water to start off with, so you're stuck with either waiting for it to cool down from 70 degrees or warming it up from fridge temp to room temp.

Steph - when my DD was a baby (3 now) I gave up warming bottles altogether when she was 5 - 6 weeks old. What I would do before bed was boil and sterilise then put the cool boiled water in the sterilised bottles and bring the powder up to bed. Then when she woke I would just bung the powder in, give it a good shake and go. Hence all her bottles were at room temp even in the day from about 6 weeks and I never had any problems - having said that she was never a very gassy/colicky baby anyway. When out and about I would use the ready prepared cartons and just pour them straight in a sterilised bottle. One advantage i found was that when I weaned her and wanted to get her drinking water she never objected to water because it wasn't warm - a couple of mothers I know who used to warm all bottles had a lot of probs then getting their kids to accept water. Good luck and congrats!

Katy, whilst a lot of people did that a few years ago (I was one of them) because we were never told not to, it's not best practice because the powder itself is not guaranteed to be free of harmful bacteria - you should add hot water to the powder in order to kill them.

Of course most of our babies experienced no ill effects from using the unsafe method, but for a very young baby it's probably not a risk worth taking.

Katy, another thing to bear in mind is that the powder is not sterile so it doesn't matter if your bottle and water are: adding the unsterile powder makes an unsterile feed. The powder needs to make contact with hot water.