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Monday, October 23, 2006

Useless Packaging aka Travel Lids

First of all, thanks to Amy Guth, author of Three Fallen Women, for her virtual book tour stop on Formula Fed and Flexible Parenting yesterday. We enjoyed having you here!

After deciding on Dr. Brown's bottles for my older son (OS), my husband did the reasonable thing and went out and bought a million of them. Okay, maybe it was more like 10, but when looking at the boxes and boxes of bottles spilling over the counter, it felt like a lot. Demonstrating the smooth teamwork that you expect to see out of exhausted parents, I pulled each bottle out of the packaging along with the associated equipment and handed it to my husband to run put in the dishwasher. As I was unscrewing the nipples, I noticed that there was a small circular piece of white plastic between the nipple and the top of each bottle. It was rather annoying to have to fish this "trash" out of the bottle, but I didn't think too much about it as I made several donations to a landfill.

A short while later (approximately five minutes after the sanitation department had done their next pickup), I noticed that whenever I stuck a bottle in a diaper bag, it would leak all over the place. I had already learned the lesson about overly tight bottle caps and leaking, so I knew there were more lessons to be learned. I realized two things: 1) Bottle gaps are exempt from normal rules of gravity, and they somehow hold formula when removed from a bottle until they are directly over your jeans. At that point they quickly release any retained liquid. 2) Those little plastic things are travel lids.

Travel lids keep the formula from getting inside of the nipple and thus collecting in the cap and spilling all over your jeans. Or more recently all over the diaper bag backpack, when you bend over to help your son. (You know which backpack. The one containing your son's newly minted artwork as well as the bluetooth headset to your phone. The good news is that it is apparently sometimes possible to accidentally put a bluetooth headset through a full laundry cycle and have it continue to work. The bad news is that if you follow the example of whatever unknown individual may have done that, you may not be as lucky as I...er um as they were.)

When my younger son (YS) was born, I came to another realization. The little bottles that came with my Pump In Style were also equipped with travel lids. During OS's infancy, I had been confounded by the mysteries of those bottles. Each came with a top that had a plastic, removable center. I never understood why they came that way, and after recovering from 39 hours of back labor including two hours of pushing and a c-section, I lacked the ambition required to read the instructions. When I took a new, although once again exhausted look, at the contraption, I realized that the plastic piece was another travel lid that could be replaced with a nipple when ready for feeding. No more need to transfer the breastmilk to a "regular" bottle. Nipple replacement was all that was required.

A. Elliot's Lesson Learned: Travel Lids Enforce the Law of Gravity in order to Keep Bottles from Leaking








Picture of Travel Lid
Picture of Travel Lid
Picture of Travel Lid

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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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