Formula advice needed for France please.

[barbie1]

Hi,
We have just relocated from the ME to Paris with a stop in London Inbetween.

While in london we took our 3 month old son to the Portland hospital due to reflux and after a few appointments it was decided that it would be best to stop breast feeding and start formula feeds...

Anyway, so here we are in France and I have no idea how to make up the bottles having previously ebf dd1 for 15 month I have never really made bottles up before

The water here is hard, everything gets covered in lime scale so we bought a filter. I have been boling filtered water, waiting for it to cool to add the formula and then waiting for it to cool enough to give to ds, or in a rush topping up the bottle with cold boiled water. (still sticking to guidelines for water to formula ratio)

I have noticed most mums make up bottles directly from Evain water bottles, which mean that they are cold. Ds dislikes cold milk. Surely the nasty bug things can't be killed in cold water? The local mums tell me it's bad to boil filtered water and to just buy Evain.

So do I boil the bottled water? Or is filtered from the tap ok?

Any advice for a confused mum would be greatly appreciated!

Hard water is still drinkable, we lived in a hard water area when ds was being ff and we just boiled the water in the kettle, left it to cool slightly if I remembered and then added it to the formula.

I wouldn't even think to do it any different if I were in another country with a clean water supply.

I live in a hard water area and I never filtered it or anything. When I visited my parents in france with DS and neighbours saw me preparing bottles for him, they were horrified I wasn't using bottled water for him. I think it's just a cultural thing, a lot of my parents neighbours would buy bottled water for themselves when the tap water is perfectly fine to drink.

We lived in Germany and had similarly hard water.

Filter, let cool to 70°C and make up bottles.

Don't make up bottles with cold water - you are quite right - 70°C is required to kill of nasty bacteria.

It is a faff, but my DS has salmonella poisoning when he was 5 mths old and it was horrible. He was not weaned, and purely bf, so it must have come from the formula.

If I just boil the tap water and put into bottles it looks chalky, we didn't realise for a few days and ds was most unsettled. Swopped to filtered boiled water and he settled down
So it's ok to boil filtered water then?
mmelindor that sounds scary, I think I'm doing the bottles the same way as you, tis a faff but I'd rather that then try to explain using my non existent French to a doctor in a hospital!

When looking after babies in Framce I always boiled Evian. Some areas have very dodgy (lead) piping.

But yes, hot water - over 70 - is needed to kill germs in the powder. Contrary to what many French mothers believe Eviandoes not have magic properties.

There are 2 issues really. 1 is that the water is not necessarily safe (bit you would probably know if that were the case) and 2 the powder is definitely not safe to be used with cold water. But people seem to mix the two and think that if they don't use tap water it'll be fine.

Hard water tip - put a marble in your kettle; it attracts the lime scale and results in less chalky water :)

Barbie
As far as I know, the chalk only affects the taste, it is not harmful.

One thing that works well is to let the water cool for a while then pour into a thermos flask. If you know it is going to be several hours, then put it into thermos while a little over 80°C.