Warming Your Breast Milk

To begin with, you must remember NOT to warm your milk in the microwave. There are a number of reasons not to do this, but to state a couple:

• the microwave warms very erratically and there may be various areas in the milk that will heat up more than others, which may lead to burning your baby’s mouth;
• some of the nutrients in the breast milk may be destroyed as you microwave, and guess what, all that hard work that you just did went down the drain.

You can use the microwave to heat up water. We kept a specific microwave-safe cup by the sink, filled it up with water and put it into the microwave for 2 minutes. Take the bottle from the refrigerator and hold on to the top of the bottle, spinning it slightly in the cup of hot water. In about 1 minute the bottle is nice and warm, within a total of 3 minutes. The slight spinning of the bottle in the cup of water thoroughly heats the milk throughout the bottle, without having to shake it, causing those horrible gas-producing bottles.

The water can also be heated on the stove, but it takes a bit longer to heat the water and you must monitor the water to make sure that it does not get too hot.

Also, bottle warmers are a good choice, however, most take between 5-10 minutes for the heating element to heat up.

* Do not handle the hot water while you are holding the baby.