BF 8 week old struggling with bottle

[RunJHC]

DS2 is 8 weeks old and EBF, piling on weight & generally a picture of health. I've been expressing 4-5oz every morning for DH to give a bottle about 10/11pm so I can get some sleep.

DS2 does take the bottle & has a varying amount of milk but he seems to find the whole thing quite stressful! He seems to gulp in loads of air & get really upset during the bottle feed. Then afterwards he doesn't settle & is quite upset. He quite often can't calm down so DH ends up bringing him up to me for a BF to calm him down.

Any ideas on how we can improve his bottle feeding? He's on tommee tippee bottles & we've tried both no1(slow) & variflow teats but he seems to struggle with both...

Oh and I am a bridesmaid on Saturday in a v non-feeding friendly dress so hoping he can have a few bottles in the afternoon until I can change in the evening!

Marking place as DD2 exactly the same. She is 13 wks now. Wks 4-8 was just like your son. 8-12 refused bottle point blank. We have her back on them to the extent she isn't screaming at the sight of one anymore (only time she does scream!) but she just doesn't seem to know what to do. I am determined to have a dinner in London with my best friends on Monday but dreading leaving her for more than a couple of hours. Feel a bit trapped by the whole situation tbh!

Bump

Hi not sure I will have much useful advice but it did take several sessions for DD to get the hang of the bottle at around this age. How long have you been trying?
It might also help to try during the day when they are more awake until they have the knack.
Finally you can get a big difference with different teat flow rates...if you have leaky pumpy boobs then your DC's might be used to a higher flow rate than they can get out of the bottle so you could try the 2 teats which definitely glug faster (and beware an increase in suction power if they develop some muscles!) and in the opposite direction if you have harder work boobs then your DCs could be struggling with milk arriving too fast and a slower rate teat would be useful, although as far as I know teat 1 is the slowest.

Oh DH reminds me we had a position issue too. They still need to get the teat up to the special place on the palate so you need to have them tilted just so to get it far enough in and in the right direction (less of an issue as they get older though) - its jsut like getting the position right for the boob all over again...