Dr. Brown's Baby Bottles

There's really only one reason we used these, which is that at the baby shower, someone gave a starter set to us. That said, there was not reason to look at anything else since baby M had no complaints. They're advertised to have a patented venting system, which mimics breastfeeding by preventing air bubbles and that supposedly reduces burping, gas, spit-up and even colic. It certainly makes sense in principle, that baby should not slowly create more vacuum in the bottle and thus make sucking out the milk more difficult. Apparantly, this vacuum-free effect also preserves the nutrients in milk and formula by reducing oxidization since there aren't any bubbles passing through the liquid. My wife was initially apprehensive about using plastic, and we got a few glass bottles to start, but they've quite heavy, and got less use because of that, eventually. I will say that a big downside of the Dr. Brown system is the number of parts. It's not complicated to put together or take apart, but it all needs washing. We, which is to say, I, hand washed everything since we had no confidence that a dishwasher could wash the tube/pipette-like things (they provide a little scrubber brush to wash these). I'll tell you a bright idea we had about baby bottles and going out -- buy a wide mouth Thermos (or equivalent), big enough so that if you have hot water in it, and you immerse your bottle, it comes up high enough such that it'll warm the contents. This is how we warmed the milk at restaurants or wherever. At home, we used a constant hot water device to essentially do the same thing since you wouldn't catch us microwaving the milk.