Born Free Bottles

So, Nathan is already 5+ months old. Rich and I went through this whole argument before he was born, and the whole bisphenol A scare initially surfaced... However, at the time, Rich won and convinced me that if the plastic in baby bottles was truly leaching poisonous chemicals at toxic levels, then they would immediately be banned and pulled off the shelves. Rich felt that the whole thing was very gimicky and would not let me replace all of Maddie's old bottles (we used both Avent and Dr. Browns interchangeably with her).

Anyway, fast forward several months -- I just placed a very expensive order for a whole new set of Born Free bottles for Nathan and drinking cups for Maddie. I wish I had bought the bottles at the very beginning so that we could've gotten a full year's use out of them, but I figure, Nathan still has a lot of bottle-time left. At $10 per bottle or cup, Born Free is definitely not cheap, but I guess it's comparable to paying more for organic products.

My mom literally flipped out when I told her about the potential leaching problem with most of the regular bottles. She was basically saying that I'm putting these things in my baby's mouth and she couldn't believe that I hadn't switched everything out upon learning that there was even a suspicion that they might not be 100% safe. So, that was the straw that broke the camel's back and convinced me (finally) to buy the new bottles.

I swear, there are so many things now that we expose our children to that supposedly cause cancer. Think about all the recent toy recalls with the lead paint. Then there's my mom's mantra of not microwaving plastic or plastic wrap. Rich's mom's big thing is never to buy any foods packaged in China, since they pretty much don't regulate any of their products. Dude, everything is made in China these days!

The real question is, is it even possible to stay away from these potentially harmful things all of the time? Yeah, I suppose if we lived in a bubble and raised all our own food. *sigh* I guess we can only do the best we can do and accept the fact that nothing's completely safe anymore.