You have to praise the folk at Avent. With an arrangement to have their product stand universally front and centre at all major baby retail stores (think Baby Bunting, Baby Mode etc etc), you almost feel guilty not buying the various combinations of bottles, , dummys, teats, bottle warmers and contraptions that seem so mandatory for the twins and if you don’t have every combination of teat, bottle and dummy that your children will somehow be grossly disadvantaged in life.
Part of the checklist of admitting to the hospital was to bring your own bottles. So anxious parents that we were we visited baby bunting every other weekend to assess which bottles we needed to buy. Not really having any clue as to why a bottle was better than any other. Due to the superior product placement and bright parent-friendly colours we bought some Avent bottles. Surely given the nice schmik look and wide rims and special airflex skirt system technology teat how could we possibly go wrong? I forked over the premium price that one expects to pay for what is clearly superior bottle technology and thought nothing more of it.
We had made the decision a few days after the boys were born that bottle feeding was going to work better for us. So after coming to terms with this strategy, we needed to buy bottles. In the chaos of the days after the boys were born and before the sleep deprivation really took hold we tried to use the aforementioned Avent bottles but received some interesting advice from our Nurse.
“Those teats aren’t really suitable for newborns. Best go down to the chemist and buy some Medala bottles. They are better.”
Could have used that before I forked out my hard earned at baby bunting. Which is a franchise I should have bought shares in by the way.
So we bought some Medala bottles, and sure enough, they were easier to use and seemed to be more effective that the Avent equivalent.
Must be a newborn thing.
In time, we went home and back to baby bunting to buy more supplies – including bottles. Avent seemed to be the only choice. Again how could the airflex skirt system be wrong? We also forked over for an Avent bottle warmer. Clearly the combination of teat, bottle and warmer technology is critical to the flow and prevents overheating and will provide the optimal delivery mechanism to ensure my bubbas get the right amount at the right temperature at the right time so they can be big and strong and smart???
Feeding never seemed to be easy. Although I guess nothing seems easy when you are sleep deprived and often can’t see straight because its 4AM and your boys are colicky and deliberately de-synching their sleep patterns seemingly on purpose to annoy their parents.
It wasn’t until we spent some time in the Mother Baby Unit at Northpark that logic and common sense slowly seemed to materialise. In the first couple of days, one the more experienced nurses noticed the collection of Avent souvenirs that we had accumulated. “No good those bottles. Best going down to Coles to buy the cheap bottles. They are better. ”. How could the 5 for $3 bottles at the supermarket be better than the Avent Airflex teat technology? Also commented on the bottle warmer: “Whats that thing? Why don’t you just use the Microwave?” …uhhh what about the optimal warming ? “Rubbish. Just give it a bit of a shake and she’ll be right”
Common sense – we could have used that earlier.
We bought the cheaper bottles sold the bottle warmer on Ebay and haven’t looked back. So in effect we could have saved a fair whack of money had we just gone the cheap option right from the start. The baby market is just primed for new parents like us who are either uninformed or lack experience. Avent are exactly the company that will sucker us in to believing that Airflex technology and buying a new teat every month will somehow make the twins sleep better or feed more easily. In reality the reverse is true and all Avent are doing is using clever marketing to dive deeper into new parents wallets.
The lesson for us – bottle feeding aint rocket science. The cheaper solutions work just as well if not better than the more expensive ones.
