I'm so glad my breastmilk was always the right temperature and I didn't need silly gadgets like that.
;-)

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Okay, I've recovered from the phallic feeder and "rapacious capitalism dressed in the sheep's clothing of science."

I was wondering: I read somewhere that you should test on the *back* of your wrist, as it's more sensitive. I rarely heat bottles (I use room temp water) so I don't have much opportunity to test this. Do you all think that's true?

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Both my babies were born in June, in the middle of horrific heat waves. We lived in a tiny house out in the country; I had no laundry facilities or air conditioner or ANYTHING that resembled civilization as far as I, a lazy sort of person, could see. When my first baby was three weeks old, at a routine post-delivery visit to her pediatrician, I mentioned that it was tricky for me to get her formula warm-without-being-hot, since I had to plunk it in a pan of water on the stove. The doctor looked at me for a moment and said, "What is the temperature outside?" "Over a hundred in the shade," I replied. "And are you and your family wearing clothing that corresponds to the weather?" he asked. "Yes, we are. It's definitely shorts and light shirts and sandals in this kind of weather." I replied. "And in the midst of this terrible heat, do you long for hot coffee, hot cocoa, brakkish water, heated soft drinks, and warm milk? Do these sound refreshing and good to you?" he asked. "No, I would never drink those in this weather; it would be horrible!" I told him.

And then he said, "Then why would you give your baby heated formula in this weather?"

He went on to say that for most healthy babies, it wasn't necessary to heat it at all. He had always given his own babies their bottles right out of the refrigerator. He said that unless your baby obviously objected, or had a weak stomach or some other problem, heating the formula was a waste of time and the baby really couldn't care less.

I was horrified, because Mom had always stressed to me the importance of warm milk/formula/whatever for a small baby's sensitive little stomach. It was ingrained in me that baby formula should be warm, like breastmilk.

But I went home, took a bottle of formula out of the 'fridge, ice cold, and tentatively tried it out on Sara. She snapped to attention like she'd never done before, her eyes lit up like little lighthouses, and she had that cold formula drained in no time flat. Afterwards, she was wide awake and alert and observant, not drowsy and groggy like before, after she'd dined on something warm.

Her doctor told me that there were many things we automatically did for our babies here in this country that were giggled at in Japan. He also said many Japanese baby customs horrified American mothers. The jist of it all, he said, was that in this country, it is stressed to us that babies are so extremely fragile and sensitive and easy to damage somehow, that we do many things we wouldn't really have to do, in fear of triggering something in them. Whereas, in Japan, babies are considered pretty tough gristle, and while they are nurtured and loved and well cared for, things like heating formula aren't done because they aren't considered necessary.

The doctor did compliment me for not overdressing my baby in such heat, and for not swaddling her in a receiving blanket in this heat. "Some mothers," he said, "thought it absolutely necessary, and didn't even stop to think about adapting a baby's clothing to the weather; they assumed that babies were always cold and needed winter clothes all the time."

I never heated another bottle. Not for my daughter, not for my son. We had no feeding problems whatsoever.

(I would have continued to breastfeed if I could; it wasn't possible for medical reasons. That lasted ten days with Sara; I tried again with Andy but it didn't work for reasons that no amount of "counseling and advice from a practitioner and perseverence, etc" could have remedied, so please don't tell me I could have if I'd really wanted to. That hurts a mother who wants to but can't.)

Now I think I'll have an ice cold diet Coke.

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I breastfed, and never dealt with the bottles of expessed milk that my first-born occasionally got, so I don't much about heating bottle and can't vouch for any method or beliefs.

But my mother always assumed I'd bottlefeed (because everyone did when she was raising kids), so she'd give long lectures on how to do it properly. She told me that she would warm them up when we were newborns. Then, slowly, she'd warm them less and less, getting us used to cooler bottles. Eventually, she'd give them to us right out of the refrigerator.

Not warming them also had the added advantage of getting them to us quicker, which had us crying less and less waiting for our meals.

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I just tried it. Sprinkling anything on my wrist is easier than sprinkling it on either elbow. I warmed bottles and sprinkled until the last two of my kids came along (several years after the first three). By then I had learned somewhere that cold was okay.

The milk starts out cold but by the time it reaches their tummy, it's warm.

Now that I think about it, I always tested bath water with my elbow.

As for buying a gadget to tell me whether or not I'm about to scald my child, Barnum was right.

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