Bringing Your Bottle Fed Baby on Holidays - You Know You Wanna!

As you well know by now I’m a huge advocate for bringing baby(ies) away on holiday with you. All of my 5 little ones have had their first City Break before they were 12 weeks old. Time & time again I’m asked by new Mums what to do when bringing a bottle fed baby on holiday. How can they sterilise bottles while staying in a hotel? There are a few options to choose from & bringing your huge counter top/microwaveable steriliser is definitely not one of them!

First things first, no matter what way you choose to sterilise you will need washing up liquid & a bottle brush so you can wash the bottles in your bathroom sink. You can bring these with you, as I do, for convenience or buy them locally at your destination.

Disposable cold water sterilising bags are available at Mothercare, Boots & a host of other online stores. They come in a box of 7 bags, individually wrapped and containing a sterilising tablet so there is no need to buy those separately. 

Each bag holds 4 9oz bottles and sterilising is complete in 30 minutes for the Oasis brand & 15 minutes for the Innosence brand. They are advertised as being a 7 day supply but if your baby is on 6 bottles a day you will need to buy a second box. 

Bags are disposable and can only be used once. These would be ideal if you are adventurous enough to bring baby camping as you don’t need any electricity. They retail at approx €13 for a box of 7 bags.

Every hotel, motel or B&B has a microwave so I always use this method, even while travelling Route 66. Microwave steriliser bags come in boxes of usually 3 – 5 depending on the brand you buy. 

You can of course buy much larger boxes on Amazon, these work out cheaper. A box of 3 Munchkin microwave steriliser bags retail at €6.99 in boots while a box of 5 Dr. Browns bags comes in at €10.99 on all4baby.ie 

Each bag can be used 20 times & each bag fits 2, 9 oz bottles, sterilisation is complete in 3 minutes. Some hotels will provide you with a microwave in your room but there is a rental cost, in the USA it was anything up to $40 per night a tad expensive for something you only need for 10 minutes. So I used to wash & bag the bottles then bring my 3 bags to reception, usually there is a microwave in the reception area. When there wasn’t one available I simply asked the receptionist to put them in the hotels microwave.

I was given the Numum Portable Steriliser to trial and, I have to say, at first I thought ‘God, it'd take you ages to sterilise a batch of bottles one at a time’ but that’s not what the creators had in mind. 

It is designed to sterilise one bottle while you are out & about, on the go, or on holiday, when it’s just not possible to get to a power outlet. The Numum uses the latest UV-C sterilisation technology to sterilise a bottle in just 120 seconds. 

It felt really strange to take a dry cold bottle from the steriliser as I’m used to them being too hot to handle & full of steam! Numum is compatible with all standard feeding bottles, unfortunately though not Dr. Browns bottles. 

To fully charge the built in lithium-ion battery takes 3 hours. You are then free as a bird to go out or travel with your baby armed with just a bottle, formula & your Numum. The only drawback that I could find is that you can’t sterilise the lid of a bottle as you are supposed to sterilise the bottle as & when you need it so there actually should be no need to use a lid. 

With this method you’d need to buy Evian water as its safe to use straight from the bottle for babies & your powder formula or you could buy the ready made cartons of formula. This is the most expensive steriliser retailing at €130. This is an introductory offer available at the moment.

Another way is to buy premade bottles & pre sterilised teat from any leading supermarket, personally I have used SMA for all of my little ones, so I know this brand is available in this format. It can work out quite expensive doing it this way if you are going away for more than a weekend.

Tommee Tippee steri-bottles are disposable pre steralised bottles. You will need to buy cartons of formula to use with these. I find these fantastic for the travel part of your holiday, especially on long haul flights as you don’t have a change bag full of dirty bottles when you arrive at your destination. Boots currently have a 5 pack of these for €6.29.

So there you have it, easy peasy ways to steralise your babie's bops while on the move. What are you waiting for? 

Go, book that holiday & have a fantastic time!