Hitting the bottle!!!

[flyingheart]

I need to get my 5 and a half month DD, who has been EBF, to take milk from another source.

Have tried water (plain and sweetened) and milk (various) from Avent, Nuk and cups with and without valve. She tends to spit out fluids but is currently doing very well with solids. Breastfeeding has worked well for us and she took to it instantly.

She has taken 1oz of Aptamil from my mum using a NUK bottle but it was a traumatic experience for her and was only achieved with lots of 'old school' persistence from my mum. DD was really getting worked up and I don't want to put her off the whole thing - plus it was tearing my heart apart!

She won't take anything from my DH and he keeps banging on about the fact that we should have introduced a bottle ages ago - driving me to distraction!

Any pearls of wisdom would be brilliant as I am now at a loss...

try giving her milk in a doidy cup instead of a bottle. it will be messy at first but she will get the hang of it quite quickly.

Have you tried expressed breast milk? Maybe if it is a taste she is familiar with it would help.

Babies of this age really, really don't need bottles - they can usually manage a cup just fine, with a lot of help at first. Why struggle with a bottle? :)

SugarPlum suggests a Doidy - good idea. Or you can use a little egg cup at first, or any of the spouted cups (though they can be hard work for young babies).

Off to get a doidy - thanks ladies! x

PS, don't fret about not having introduced a bottle earlier. It's no guarantee of anything - my DD had only bottles for the first 8 weeks, when we went back to BF, and then at around 4 months she completely refused to take bottles at all. So it's not necessarily a case of having got them used to it when they were younger.

agree with narmada, my friends DD took a bottle happily for ages, and then refused them suddenly. Introducing a bottle early doesn't guarantee they'll always accept one.

Thanks narmada and cosmosis, that has reassured me!