[Childcare] A story about the effective combination of “liquid milk + milk warmer” for nighttime crying.

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This article can be read in about 10 minutes.

Introduction

When a baby is a newborn, up to about six months of age, it is no exaggeration to say that how to deal with nighttime crying is a matter of life and death.

Now, I will describe how to get the baby to drink milk quickly when he starts crying at night because I liked the combination of liquid milk + milk warmer.

Premise: Other children are sleeping in the same bedroom

When a baby begins to cry at night, depending on how old he or she is, it is usually for the following basic reasons.

  • Milk: 70%.
  • Diaper changes with poop: 20%.
  • Carrying: 10%.

Therefore, how quickly the baby starts drinking milk is important for the baby to stop crying.

As far as the house is concerned, we currently have a 6-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 0-month-old, all of whom sleep in a river on the floor in their beds. And as for the baby’s nightly crying, the parents take turns on a daily basis.

So the parent on the baby’s night crying duty day sleeps next to the crib and makes and gives milk when the baby starts crying.

If there are no other children sleeping in the same bedroom, it is fine to make milk and give it to the child after about 2 or 3 minutes after the child begins to cry.

The way I used to do it: formula + hot + cold water.

The way we have been doing it is as follows

  • Boil water in a kettle to 80 degrees Celsius (must be at least 70 degrees Celsius. (Because 70°C or higher is necessary to kill the minute amounts of bacteria present in powdered milk, especially Bacillus subtilis sakazakii.)
  • Fill a baby bottle with formula.
  • Dissolve the formula first in a baby bottle with 1/3 to half of the total volume of 80°c hot water.
  • Then add room temperature water.
  • If the temperature is too hot, pour water over the container of powdered milk to cool it.

In this case, it takes about one minute to boil water to 80°C in a kettle, and it isn’t easy to adjust the temperature after adding room-temperature water. If too much 80°C water is added, of course, the baby bottle is hot and needs to be cooled with water, which may take one to two minutes in some cases.

Sometimes I was too sleepy, and if I had cooled the bottle with water in my sleepy state, the bottle would have been too cold and the baby would have drank less.

So, in total, it takes about 2 to 3 minutes. And during that time, the baby’s night cries get louder and louder.

Do you have any milk left to make?

A possible solution to this problem is to make and store milk in powdered formula, but basically, making and storing baby formula is considered undesirable, and for hygienic reasons, it is recommended that if the baby does not drink within two hours of making the formula, it should be discarded.

Although slightly out of date (2007), the WHO has published “Guidelines for the Safe Preparation, Storage and Handling of Infant Formula”, which provides more details.

This method is highly uncertain because this two-hour period is surprisingly exquisite, sometimes crying every two hours at night, sometimes three or four hours.

Incidentally, when making and storing baby formula, cool it under running or cold water as soon as it is finished (because high temperatures make it impossible to maintain milk hygiene), store it at 5°C or lower, and do not use a microwave oven when warming it up.

After all, the milk would have to be heated by boiling water, so even if it were made up, the time difference between serving the milk would not be that great.

I just switched to liquid milk + milk warmer.

So I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I decided to try liquid milk + milk warmer.

I purchased Hohoemi liquid milk and a milk warmer called LARUTAN

First, the nutritional composition of liquid milk does not change between powdered and liquid milk.

In addition, since the milk is sterilized in the can, it is free of Bacillus sakazakii, which is dangerous to infants (newborns and infants under 2 months of age are at highest risk). As long as the package is not opened, it can be kept in a sterilized state for a long period of time (approximately one year). Once opened, it should be given within 2 hours.

LARUTAN’s milk warmer also comes with a mobile battery, which can be charged with a USB cable. So, during the daytime, the battery can be fully charged with a USB cable.

In our case, the milk time is now roughly every 3 hours: 10:00 pm, 1:00 am, 4:00 am, and 7:00 am. We switched to liquid milk + milk warmer at 1:00 am and 4:00 am.

Bring milk warmer and two bottles of liquid milk for nighttime use to the bedroom in advance.

After giving milk at 10:00 p.m., set the liquid milk in the milk warmer and pre-warm it by setting the temperature to 42 degrees Celsius. Then, when the baby begins to cry at about 1:00 a.m., remove the liquid milk from the milk warmer and give the baby milk by attaching the attachment and the mouth of the bottle as shown in the figure below.

The milk warmer is then set up with liquid milk for the next hour (4:00 AM) before the milk.

By doing this,

  • The time between when they start crying at night and when I feed them milk has been reduced to about 15 seconds, so I don’t have to worry about other kids waking up.
  • I no longer have to travel from my bedroom to the kitchen every time I want to make milk.

This created the advantage of

The only drawback I would raise is that, unlike clear baby bottles, it is difficult to visually see how much milk the baby is drinking because of the canned milk and opaque container. You have to figure it out by the weight in your hand (but this is not really a problem).

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