Monday, December 15, 2008

Experimenting with Bottlefeeding

Wednesday evening is Doug's company Christmas Dinner. We had hoped that it would of been scheduled for a weekend night so my mom could babysit the kids for us, but that wasn't possible. Instead, we are lucky to have my friend Ellie able to come over. We decided to see if Ella will take a bottle of breastmilk, so that she can stay home too.

We have a big stash of Playtex Nurser bottles from when Sean used them at daycare. It's the only bottle we ever tried with him, but he started taking them at 3 wks old due to his poor feeding. I bought new nipples for Ella and gave it a go Saturday evening. No dice. She latched on it a couple of times for me, but would push it away after a couple of sucks. I had Doug try to feed her with it and she refused it from him also. I thought, "Maybe she doesn't like it because it's the slow flow nipple and I have a fast let down?" So I decided to try a fast flow nipple in it next.

Sunday afternoon, she woke from a nap and was happy but ready to feed. Perfect time to try the bottles again. I pumped 4 ozs of milk, and tried the Playtex bottle with the fast flow nipple. Rejected. (No pictures of this one, I was washing/sterilizing the others.) We bought a couple of other bottles to try, it was hard choosing them! I know very little about bottles, but had friends that used the Dr Brown's bottles so I got one of those. Ella had a Soothie pacifier that she liked a little when she was about a month old, so I got one of those bottles to try. $18 and 2 bottles later we were ready to experiment again.


Doug tried to give her the Dr Brown's bottle and had no luck. She cried and pushed it out of her mouth.



I poured the milk into the Soothie bottle and gave that a try. Nope, she didn't want that either.


Now she was mad. Mad and hungry and tired of people sticking weird things in her mouth.


So she opted for the original packaging...


Sean didn't want to see good milk go to waste, so he downed the milk in the Soothie!


Doug wants to try a few more times, but it is looking to me like Ella's going out for some fine dinning Wednesday night.

6 comments:

Cheryl said...

My babies that were breastfed never would take a bottle either.I love the pics.That is sooo cute where Sean is drinking the milk his sister wouldn't take.

Beverly said...

I never even tried to give Noah a bottle. You are brave to try! Good luck!

Jennifer said...

Neither of mine would take a bottle either. The closest we got with Aidan was a cheap gerber bottle, but still it was only 1 oz that we pretty much dripped into his mouth. Good luck!

Lisa said...

All my kids have been exclusively breastfed and none have taken bottles. Finn took bottles of ebm for a while when he was in the NICU and afterwards when we were offering him a bottle of supplemental ebm to encourage weight gain, but we stopped the bottles for a couple weeks and when we tried again, no luck, and none since then. I had to go back to work when my oldest son was 9 weeks old, and he would literally starve himself all day long at daycare rather than take a bottle :( I think I waited too long to introduce a bottle to my babies (except in Finn's case where the failure was not keeping up with giving him bottles). The usual advice for nursing moms is to wait 4+ weeks before introducing a bottle, but all my friends who have had babies who go back and forth easily between breast and bottle started bottles within the first week or two. I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I feel for you, as I'm in the same boat.

JennyH said...

Cute pics. She was MAD! Hope Ella enjoys her fine dinning Wednesday!!

Tricia said...

We've been having the same problem! The Adiri is a LITTLE helpful...but Rainer prefers...pretty much insists...on the real thing. Doesn't look like I will be going to get a PT night job anytime soon! :)