No More Sterilizing?

Apparently, you don’t have to sterilize bottles. It makes sense: if you’re not going to sterilize them before every use, why would you bother doing it only sometimes?

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Bottles

I thought it would be interesting, for the sake of posterity, to record just how many bottles we go through in a day. I’ve gotten into the routine of making up all of the day’s bottles the night before, which means we get to see them all laid out:

• Julian’s morning bottle: 6 oz of milk
• One top-off bottle for Julian and Eloise before their morning nap: 2 oz of milk each
• Julian’s three daytime bottles: 5 oz of milk each
• Julian’s two prune juice bottles: 2 oz each (1 oz prune juice + 1 oz water)
• Bedtime bottles: 7 oz of formula for Eloise, 8 oz of formula for Julian, with a milliliter of TriViSol vitamins in each

It adds up to a lot of milk, a lot of formula to mix, and a lot of bottles to wash (as our friend Emilie beautifully documented).

When Julian’s prune juice issue finally resolves, that will be a relief. Of course, when Rachel goes back to work we’ll add three more daytime bottles for Eloise. Whew!

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Graph

We’ve been using Trixie Tracker if not quite religiously, at least diligently, and generally we love it. It’s been incredibly helpful not to have to remember when Julian last ate, or when Eloise last pooped, since we can just look it up. I’ll write at more length some other time about how we’re using the service and its strengths and weaknesses, but for now I’ll just share that I discovered the “export” feature and have been having some fun in Excel.

Here’s Julian’s eating history. We have a five-day trailing average of ounces of breastmilk+formula in blue (left axis) and number of bottles per day in red (right axis).

The math nerd in me just got very excited. I could run a linear regression! Hypothesis: minutes slept per day is positively correlated with ounces consumed, and negatively correlated with minutes slept the previous day.

Filed under Parenting | Tags: bottles, data, julian | Comment (1)