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The Care of Babies: Bring
Put the water to be used in mixing the food on the fire in a covered saucepan. Bring it to a boil and keep it, until ready for use, in the same vessel in which it was boiled.
Now mix the food exactly as the doctor directs, or in accordance with the formula you have adopted. Always mix it exactly the same way. As soon as the food has been placed in nursing bottles or fruit jar, and stoppered properly, put these on ice or in the coolest place you can find .
Work quickly and do not let the milk or prepared food stand in a warm room any longer than is necessary.
Or, if the milk is not perfectly fresh, or has not been freshly pasteurized, it may be pasteurized after it has been prepared and placed in the nursing bottles. This is perhaps the safest course, as it avoids all possibility of contamination from the time the food is prepared until it is fed. After the nursing bottles are filled stand them up on a plate in the bottom of a saucepan filled with luke-warm water up to within two or three inches of the tops of the bottles. Bring the water slowly to a boil. Then remove the saucepan from the fire and let the bottles stand in the hot water for fifteen or twenty minutes. Now cool the water surrounding the bottles by pouring in cold water. But take care not to cool the bottles so quickly as to crack them. As soon as they are cold enough to handle, plug with cotton stoppers and put them on the ice.
Or, if you have no ice, springhouse or other means of keeping milk cool, especially in summer weather, it is better to sterilize the milk absolutely by leaving the saucepan on the fire and keeping the water just at the boiling point for 20 minutes. Then chill thoroughly with cold water.
Plug with cotton and keep as cool as Such milk is not as wholeyou can. some as pasteurized or fresh milk would be if kept on ice, but it contains no living germs and is therefore safer than unsterilized milk which cannot be kept cool at 40 degrees F. or under.
Feeding the Baby.-Keep the food on ice until ready for use and heat it when the baby needs it. Never let the bottle stand in a warm room with milk in it. Be sure not to heat a bottle when you go to bed and keep it in bed until nursing time, because you do not want to go to the ice box for it. This is certain to make the baby sick. Do not attempt to keep milk at a luke-warm temperature at night or any other time in a thermos bottle or by any other , arrangement. Such a device simply acts as an incubator for germs which , at this temperature, quickly grow to enormous numbers and render the milk dangerous.
Place the nursing bottle in hot water when needed and warm the food to about body heat. Do not give the baby cold milk. Do not give the baby hot milk. Make the temperature just right. Wash your hands in soap and water before adjusting the nipple. Never put the nipple in your own mouth to find out whether the milk is warm enough.
Try it on your wrist. Taste a little from a spoon. If the milk is not sweet do not give it to the baby. proper development of the mouth and Shake the bottle before using it. teeth.
Don't feed a baby under six months of age from a cup or spoon. Sucking is the natural way by which a baby takes its food. It needs the sucking action of the lips, mouth and tongue to mix its food with the fluids of the mouth, and for the How and When to Feed. - In feeding your baby from the bottle follow as nearly as you can the same rule as feeding from the breast. Write down on a slip of paper the hours for feeding and feed by the clock at regular intervals. Break away from TABLE OF TIMES AND AMOUNTS FOR INFANT FEEDING FOR THE FIRST YEAR Number of feedings between 10 P. M.