Please take the bottle!!!

[glitterglitters]

Hi. I'm on my second baby and ebf.
My first baby would never take a bottle ever and i bought every bottle under the sun to counteract this. It ended up not working and I barely managed to get away until she started on solids and overnight until she weaned at 20 months.

Second baby I was not letting this happen and I started pumping and getting dh to give baby a bottle each night, just 1oz or 2 from 3 weeks (my supply settled quickly from feeding for a long time before).

Started really well but the last couple of days she's been putting up resistance (she's just turned a month old) and Dh has got irate (not in a physical or overly angry way but more of a ..."attitude" or "vibe") which I think baby is picking up on.

We've spent a fortune on pumps and I'm absolutely terrified of being stuck again. I've had one night out in almost three years, I've missed weddings and family hen do's because I couldn't leave the kids for too long and it's affected friendships and my social life completely. People thinking I'm being a martyr for bf when really it's because they wouldn't feed otherwise.

Please tell me if we're consistent this will work. My milk isn't high lipase, she's in a fussy cluster feedy leap I think which isn't helping but I just need her to take a bottle so I can just get an hour or two to myself sometimes.

I was in the same position with ds3, and with ds4 I gave him one bottle of EBM a day which was fine. One thing I would make sure of is that the teat of the bottle is not too slow-flowing. I had kept ds3 on a newborn teat so he wouldn't go off the breast but the result was that he went off the bottle. Why is your dh getting irate? That won't help either! A choice between grumpy Daddy and snuggly Mummy isn't much of a contest!

He's just a grumpy bum. He feels totally useless sometimes with them when they get upset and it manifests itself as frustration.

We're using newborn teats at the moment, should I buy a faster teat?

Personally I would buy a faster teat although it does go against the guidelines. The other thing ds3 eventually took for my Mum rather than for dh was a latex playtex teat although they may not make them any more. Ds3 is 12 now! Ds4 was much better and happily took a bottle of expressed milk every other day. But to be fair, ds3 has just turned out to be a stubborn sort of individual in every aspect of life and I now think it just manifested early!

It seems like it's worked out (so far). I switched to feeding her sat on my lap and Dh seems to have nailed it. She stood and starts (which is good for a bf baby) but just need to keep our consistency going.

And dd1 is as stubborn as her dad so that doesn't surprise me that there's a correlation