5mo ebf baby needs to take a bottle in 3 weeks - help!

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DS is 5 months and ebf. He would take a bottle when he was six weeks old but then life got in the way and we stopped giving him a bottle a week. I have an appointment in three weeks that will take 4-5 hours so I have to leave him with DH, but he won't take a bottle any more. He feeds about every 2 hours at the moment.

We have got Avent natural and Tommee Tippee closer to nature teats - will these now be too slow for him? He won't use a sippy cup either. We've tried feeding him hungry, not hungry, when I'm out, freshly expressed milk, nothing seems to work. Help!

Oh I remember this grief!! Try a different size teat, try doing it with you out of the way. A lot happens in 3weeks in the life of a baby. You may have stated some solids by then?

We had medela which was fab.

The Nuk latex teats are the only thing that work for us. Fast flow. Give them a try - apparently very popular with BF babies.

Nuk latex teats also worked for us. But, as a previous poster said, a lot can change in three weeks and your baby may be able to last for 4 hours just fine by then. My ds was similar and at 5.5 months I had to leave him for 5 hours. He sipped 40mls from a bottle in that time but was fine. It'll most likely be ok.

I haven't even given birth yet but know at 3 months I'll be in hospital for a short while and won't be able to bf. NCT teacher said if the mum's away then the baby will just have to accept it from a bottle! Have you tried getting your dp to do it without you around? Obviously I have no actual experience with this!

Another vote for Nuk latex teats here. Good luck!

We tried many teats, spent a fortune, and nothing worked, until we put DD in her bouncy chair and fed her. Worked a charm!

Slower flowing teats might still be ok. My DD used to have the newborn ones until she was about 6 months old, then we used the next size up. Used the same ones and still would now (she's 12 months).

My (ebf) 9 week old seems to do best with the Avent Natural 1m+ teats. The newborn ones are just too slow because he's used to my relatively fast letdown.

We had this issue with my daughter so with my son once we started giving him bottles of expressed milk we continued weekly.

Things we tried with my daughter (don't know which worked but it took a few weeks of trying lots of these):
I made sure I wasn't around when she was being fed so she couldn't smell me in the room
My hubby would try to replicate my breastfeeding so he would take off his top & feed skin to skin, feeding her at the same angle that I would
He would have an item of clothing or muslin that smelt of my milk under the bottle
He tried different temperatures of milk
I tried feeding my daughter then switching straight from boob to bottle mid feed (probably wasn't the best thing but needed to try everything!)

We had both the Avent & TT. I have to admit that I didn't know there were different teat sizes so my daughter only had 1st sized teats (whatever they're called) till she stopped using bottles at 1 year!

Good luck & I hope you manage to get him back onto a bottle, I know how hard it can be

I had one who refused a bottle but was very happy with a mini open baby cup. Needed dh to do some of the feeds so the refusal was quite a worry but this made all the difference for us thank goodness. Worth a try?