How to Clean a Baby Bottle in 800 Simple Steps

Bonjour!

As I recently explored in a post about how Le Chien adjusted to having a little brother, having a new bébé changes everything. It turns out tiny humans need a lot of stuff. Wait; allow me to rephrase. Tiny humans need A Lot of Stuff and It’s All Impossible to Put Together.

Fewer things are more humbling than caring for a newborn, including figuring out how to clean, assemble, and use All the Things.

Bien sûr, I knew les bébés need a lot of gear, from the stroller and the car seat to the crib and the high chair. I anticipated neither how compliqué the actual assembly of various items would be, nor how steep the learning curve to actually use these things (le sigh). Can I blame pregnancy hormones and COVID-slash-new mom brain?

Take the baby bottle, for example. The most basic and essentiel baby care item. The very conduit through which I would nourish and bond with my child. Surely it is just a bottle with a cap and nipple. Surely it is not compliqué.

Oh, dear reader, you whimsical tit willow. A bottle is not simple, pas du tout. The Austrian bottles I use – with their supposedly easy flow, anti-colic nipples (le sigh encore) – each have six parts. That’s right. Six. So that means L’Husband and I assemble and disassemble and wash six parts for five or six bottles every day. Every. Day.

Initially, I hand-washed the bottle parts and sterilize them by boiling on the stove. Hand washing soon gave way to the top rack in the dishwasher. (And you only have to sterilize new bottles and pacifiers once, though I sterilize pacis daily in the microwave. Because gross.)

All of this is to say, most baby stuff is overwhelming and has a million parts. Thank goodness L’Husband and I assembled the nursery and playroom furniture before Le Bébé arrived (le score). It is quite the thing to learn how to use all of the new, over-engineered gear – from the stroller to the car seat to those $&@!? bottles – while trying to wrangle tiny diapers and tiny clothes on a tiny newborn. C’est la vie.

Frankly, the tiny clothes are the least of mes troubles because they are So Dang Cute.

Bottom line: Life is already très compliqué. Baby gear shouldn’t be, but here we are. (But there are unexpected pleasures to parenting too!)

As challenging as the transition was to ready the nursery and set up and learn how to use all the gear, it brought me joy and I still love it all – the snaps and zippers on literally everything, the impossible instruction manuals, the multitude of charging cords and different-sized batteries, the bulging diaper bag. With the stuff comes Le Bébé, and he is worth every confused shake of my head as I figure out how better to feed, transport, clothe, and care for our little miracle.

What can you do to make daily tasks and household objects less complicated?

Merci for reading and please subscribe and share!

À votre santé,

Katie