Introducing bottles / cups at 7 months

[BananaPie]

Dd has been breastfed for 7 months. I never bothered with expressing or formula top ups, but I'm going back to work in a few months so want to begin to introduce formula for some feeds. Question is how on earth do I do it? She just screams when I put the bottle in her mouth!

[JiltedJohnsJulie]

Banana if its a few months away I wouldn't really worry about it now. How old will she be when you go back and will you be going back full time?

[lilham]

Have you start introducing a cup with her meals? My DD cries with bottles but will chew the teat on a tommee tippee sippy cup. I offer a cup of water with her meals (she's 6mo) and she plays/drinks from it. I have only tried the cup with milk once since I don't want to waste ebm.

I agree there's no need to worry since you are talking 9mo and older isn't it? I would just start teaching her to use a cup for the time being.

Btw I don't force the cup on her. Just let her self-feed with it.

[JiltedJohnsJulie]

Agree with lilham. Also there is no need to introduce the bottle at all as she should be ditching them by 12 months anyway.

Mine were both bottle refusers but I did have some success with using a juice spout instead of a teat with the bottle. Have seen some posters on here suggesting that if you give LO the empty bottle to play with that may help.

There is some info here on bottle feeding a bf baby.

Also, did you know that if you give one of the helplines or a local Bfing Counsellor a call they will be able to help devise a plan for getting back to work with you?

[jennimoo]

My DD is a frequent feeder, refused all bottles and cups I tried, except straw cups! Superdrug sell one at just under £2 that she has for water, although we use the Munchkin mighty grip one (I saw it in Wilkinsons the other day) for milk. She is now 1 but I've been back at work since she was 8 months.

My tips:
To get them to drink: take the straw out the cup lid, dip it in the milk and put your finger over the end to keep it full, and put this in their mouth. After a couple of goes DD started to suck so I dipped the straw in to the cup and let her suck.
The next time I just sucked myself so the taste of milk was on the end of the straw.
Only get transparent cups otherwise you can't see if the straw is in the milk.
I found the ones with valves (especially the Avent ones) sometimes don't work, and you don't want to put the LO off. I used a scalpel and skewer to break the valves open in the Munchkins, but the Superdrug ones have no valve.

Hope that helps someone, I had such trouble finding this kind of info.