4wo screamed and cried at her first bottle

[lilham]

My 4wo DD is EBF and I'd like to introduce her to bottles for when I leave her with my DH. But she doesn't seem to like the bottle at all. First my DH tried and she would spit the teat out immediately and cry. Then I took over. She took a few mouthful of it, unlatched it, cried. I repeated this about three times before she went into non stop crying. I gave up at this point. I was using the avent bottle with the newborn teat. The milk is defrosted EBM from 3 weeks ago.

Any idea what went wrong? I assume a 4wo can't be refusing bottles already?

I'd leave it a few days and try again. Sometimes it can just be that they want the breast and nothing else will pacify. Something it's a matter of finding the right teat/temp of milk. And sometimes they just refuse bottles.

You can try a cup too. They will sort of lap at it.

I think they recommend 6wks for introducing bottles so maybe it's just a bit much for a 4wk old?

Some babies just don't like bottles!

You can try:

different bottles/teats
different milk temperatures
different times of the day
different positions - on your lap facing out/bouncy chair rather than cradled for example
different people offering the bottle
offering when she's sleepy or just waking up
offering when she's hungry/not hungry
starting off breastfeeding then doing a crafty switch for a bottle halfway through!

I think the answer I don't want to hear is a different bottle! Don't want to spend more on this. But I'll give the other suggestions a try again. Haven't thought about different time or position.

I had success with Breastflow bottles - it has an inner and outer teat and the sucking action is much more similar to what they do at the breast than on a normal bottle, so is supposed to be good for breastfed babies. Lots of people also like the Tommee Tippee Closer to Nature bottles as the teat is very wide so more breast-like than a narrow teat.

Could be that your milk tastes funny when it's defrosted. Some people's does. If you have high levels of lipase in your milk, it'll taste foul when it's defrosted. You could try pumping fresh milk, then seeing if she'll take that from a bottle, that way you'll know whether it's the bottle or not...

If it is that, by the way, you can apparently scald breastmilk prior to freezing to deactivate the lipase, which otherwise remains active when the milk's frozen.