How the hell do I get my 12wo to take a bottle?!

[phantomhairpuller]

Am at my wits end!! I'm returning to work (KiT days) in 3 weeks so have recently started trying DS with expressed BM in a bottle. He absolutely does not want to know

He has successfully taken a couple of feeds from the bottle but on the whole, he messes about with the teat, then ends up getting cross- at which point he just screams every time the teat goes anywhere near his mouth!

Any advice or tips on how to make the transition?

Who will be looking after him while you are at work? Have they tried feeding him? Sometimes they are better at taking it if you aren't there.

What's in the bottle? Is it ebm and have you warmed the teat?

Not really an expert though as mine were both bottle refusers. You might haven some success with cup feeding, google kellymom alternative feeding and kellymom bottle feeding the Breastfed baby. A sippy cup might work too.

If you have a look in the Mn archive there should be plenty of old threads on bottle refusers

Marking my place - trying to introduce occasional bottle of ebm for my 8w DS, without much success...

Hi. We made the switch from BF to Neocate this weekend as 4mo is allergic to cow's milk. We followed advice from Clare Byam-Cook's book "What to Expect when your breastfeeding...and what if you can't?" Basically you have to prepare yourself for potentially 24 hours of hell before baby will accept it and you have to not give in....our son took 14 hours to finally give in (including periods where he screamed for an hour straight before falling asleep exhausted) and then took 240ml in one go! We just consoled ouselves with the fact that his unbelievably ear-splitting screaming was down to anger and disgust as he wasn't actually coming to any harm and it basically came down to a battle of wills. He's perfectly fine now and actually reaches for the bottle when he sees it!

grainmum, we tried occasional bottles of EBM as well to try and make the transition easier and he used to go ballistic which is why we ended up having to go down the "it's the bottle or nothing, mister" route!

Well, he's had one bottle so far today. It was a battle of will's between me and him- and it was one I wasn't going to lose!

I even tried calmly explaining to him why he needs to switch over to bottles as mummy needs to go back to work god help!!

It took well over an hour of screaming in temper and disgust but eventually we got there.

Next feed pumped and ready to go in an hour or so... fingers crossed

Excellent. I know it sounds mad to tell them why you are doing it but I did that as well - I think it helped me to stay calm because I was telling myself as much as him why we needed to make the change so it helped me to persevere when I felt like giving up.