Tips for introducing bottle 4 month old

[Candlesoftime]

Plea for tips, please!

Our baby was tongue tied and she really struggled to breastfeed. We gave her bottles of expressed milk and formula for the first couple of months. Once she had the tongue tie cut and we started using nipple shields, I managed to move to exclusively breastfeeding.

She's now been exclusively breastfeeding for 2-3 months. We have tried to give her a bottle of expressed milk but she's refusing, even though all she had was bottles for the first few weeks of her life!

Anyway, any tips for helping her accept a bottle?

We have already tried:

Other half feeding her and me out of the room
Other half using breastfeeding cushion and one of my tops
Warmed milk
Waiting for when she's hungry but not starving

If she's still refusing, do you think she always will refuse?

I'm probable the last person you need as both of mine were bottle refusers but have you tried a cup? We had some success with cups, enough for me to be able to leave them anyway

Following as I'm also struggling to get ebf 4 month old to accept a bottle, and hopefully this post will bp for some more advice 😊
We've tried both expressed milk and formula, both me and partner giving the bottle. We're using tommee tippee anti colic bottles, the teats do seem massive and 'hard', she just chews them and pushes them away - would love to hear if others have had more success with a particular teat/bottle ??

Oh and a massive well done to you OP for managing to ebf after mixed feeding 👏

@labourisboring Aw thanks! 😘I'm really glad I did x

If we have success I'll post which teat worked x

Hey op. Have you had any success yet? Im in the same position minus the tongue tie. She was bottle and breast fed until around 8/9 weeks when i decided to ebf. Now at nearly 5 months she won't take a bottle and iv tried a few things. Hope you manage to get her to have it. Xx

I had 1 combi fed baby and 1 EBF bottle refuser. Introduced bottles in the same way for both, just 1 didn't like it.

With bottle refusers first question is why are you using the bottle and do you have to? If you don't need to, don't bother.

If baby is 6 months / weaning then concentrate on using sippy cups etc. they can have milk in those too.

We're finally getting there with expressed milk in NUK bottles. It's taken a lot of determination from my side but I really needed her to accept it from someone else when I return to work.

Some things that helped getting the first few sucks going... Once she was started then the rest of the bottle followed ok:

• Holding in a totally different position to BF, so maybe facing you, head supported in one hand, talk to her and say "sorry it's different today but it's the same lovely milk inside, blah blah 😀"
• standing and jigging around a bit while she starts to suck
• anyone but mum giving the bottle

Hi how did it go? My friend is getting to the end of her tether, affecting her mentally and she needs her DS to take a bottle for a hen do she’s committed to in a few months. He’s 4.5 months old.

Hello again

Sad to say we never convinced her to feed from a bottle again. But we did manage cups... at about 6 months old I think when she started eating food as well. I went back to work at 12 months and she would drink milk that I pumped for her - awesome.

I'll post a link to some really good cups- they can such the milk out as well as use like a normal cup - hard to explain...

*suck the milk