Happy Baby Glass Bottles

I have mentioned that when I learnt about the possible chemical contamination in plastic baby bottles, I stopped using them and changed to Happy Baby Glass Bottles.



I'm very happy that I did, as apart from the all-important health & chemicals issue, glass simply TASTES better. The glass bottles also FEEL so much cleaner than plastic after they have been washed. They are microwave and dishwasher safe.

Those are the advantages, but there are a few drawbacks.

Wombat has managed to smash one - he was wandering around with it on our verandah and tripped over the wheel of his pram. The bottle broke right under his nose! I was right behind him and grabbed him before he could pick up any broken glass, and despite being so close to the impact he hardly even got a scratch (just the tiniest nick on one finger)! Since then I don't let him wander around outside with a bottle any more - we insist on him sitting down to drink. I think the bottle in that case must have hit a protruding nail - because he has thrown them over the side of his highchair many many many times onto hardwood floors, and they have only ever bounced. I guess this would be an important consideration if you had ceramic tiles, though.

Also, they don't come with a handy 'sealing' cap like most plastic bottles do. This means, if you can't be bothered fussing around taking the cap off to use the internal sealing plate (and I can't!) they do tend to leak. For some reason, warm liquids seem to 'spurt' a bit too, and baby is likely to get a faceful of warm milk if he tips the bottle too fast.

The bottles come with a cherry-shaped latex teat which does a reasonable job. It has micro air valves in the flange to allow air bubbles to pass into the bottle and prevent a vacuum. You can control the flow rate to some extent by tightening or loosening the collar, but if the collar is too tight, the valves won't work. I have bought Nuk vented teats with a large (cereal size) hole. These are a little too large for the collar, and you can struggle to get them to sit right. My parent-hack is to run them under cold water for a few seconds first - then they pop in quite easily without sticking. (Silicone teats seem to fit fine, but I don't like the sharp edges they often have on their seams.) If you are using latex teats, don't screw the collar on too tight, or you will have a lot of trouble getting it undone again!!!

You also need to remember that glass bottles are less forgiving of sudden temperature changes than plastic. Don't put a cold bottle straight from the fridge into boiling water, and don't do what I did recently - overheat a bottle by letting the water boil around it, then try to cool it in a hurry by running it under very cold water - the bottle broke in my hand - once again, though, the glass was very well behaved when broken - the bottom snapped off in one big piece with no small shards, and I was not cut. (To be fair, it does specifically warn against doing this on the packaging - doh!) A much safer way to cool milk if you let it get to hot is to add some cold milk to it!!!

Despite the problems I have mentioned, I still think the glass bottles are well worth the effort and having tasted the difference for myself, I would never ever go back to using plastic bottles. (I just wish Thermos Australia would bring out the Foogo here, so I could swap his plastic sippy cup too! I want to try moving him up to the straw version.)

If you are in Australia, the cheapest price I have found for Happy Baby Glass Bottles is Payless Chemists Online, but it looks like when I bought ten bottles recently, I bought all their stock! (At $2.45 each, they were so cheap I thought I'd get plenty now to make sure I had enough for future babies as well, in case they stop selling them!) You can pay up to $10 a bottle, so be sure to search around, particularly the online pharmacies.