Bottle Today, Gone Tomorrow?

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It was bloody hard work to get Riley to take the bottle. I started from when she was only little, because I knew at a certain point I was going to have to go back to work and I wanted to make sure that she could be fed by somebody else. At first she might not have liked it, but she put up with it (to a certain extent). I hated feeding her from a bottle as well, and I think this rubbed off on her a bit as well. But basically, I think she just found the whole thing confusing.

Despite all of this until she was three months old it was relatively easy to give her the bottle (a whole lot easier than the expressing that had to happen to fill up the aforementioned bottle) once a day. Then I’m not sure what happened – I think I must have taken a break from giving her bottles (because she was taking them relatively easily) and the next thing I knew it was complete refusal. She was old enough to shake her head, clam up her lips and generally protest loudly at even the sight of the bottle.

I tried ever bottle known to man. And I was doggedly persistent. In the end the bottle she took first was the Adiri and even then I had to be pretty tough love about the whole thing and the milk had to be really warm and the teat had to be warmed up as well. But amazingly, after a while she would take any bottle and when I weaned her at a year it was onto the bottle.

Now at nearly 17 months old, for someone who used to cry at even the sight of a bottle, she’s very committed to it. I’ve been trying to think of ways to get her off the bottle and on to a cup because I’d like to get rid of the bottle altogether. This is hard when everytime she sees a bottle she giggles, claps and does an excited little dance.

I could take Kim’s approach and wait until she is old enough to better understand what is happening which is pretty tempting and I’m pretty sure that’s how my mum weaned my brother off his bottle. Or there’s always the don’t offer/distraction method. But I guess the main problem is that I haven’t found any way that she will accept milk other than the bottle – ever. Any kind of cup and she just spits it out and it doesn’t matter what temperature it is.

I’m really hoping that getting her to use a cup isn’t nearly as much work as getting her to take a bottle in the first place.