How many bottles is enough?

When we first brought James back, we had maybe 2 - 3 bottles as we thought that would be more than enough. We figured, that James will be breastfed most of the time and we’ll only use the bottles a few times during the day. Like with most of our earlier assumptions, we were very wrong. Since it took a while for my wife’s milk to come through, we had to bottle feed James almost 8 times a day. Having 2 - 3 bottles was definitely too little as it then required me to constantly wash bottles almost two or three times a day.

In the end we got over 12 bottles but I figure about 8 is probably enough. You would want enough bottles to last the whole day so washing can be done once a day. If you have to wash bottles every few hours, that’s just adding extra workload that’s unnecessary.

Should they all be the same size?

One other thing that we found was useful is to get one of the wide neck bottles with standard lid sizes. This allowed us to get similar bottles from Amazon that had the same neck size, and we can interchangeably use the teats and lids from the other bottles. That way we didn’t have to worry about cleaning if we no longer one set of bottles that were original and was able to use the different bottles we bought from Amazon.