Which bottles best mimic the breast?

[ilovemyoboe]

I'm 33 weeks pregnant with my first and planning on breastfeeding. I also want to express milk so my husband and the grandparents can take over on occasion too.

There's lots of bottles out there that claim to mimic the breast - no idea which to get! Any feedback on them? I've been given an Avent electric breast pump and an Avent manual pump, so I could just go for Avent bottles, although as long as I've got something that attaches to the pump, I don't think it matters what bottle I actually use to feed. Heard that Tommy Tippee are supposed to be good.

Any feedback on your experiences greatfully received. Would like to be able to swap between breast and bottle with expressed milk without too much fuss.

I breastfed ds and expressed daily for dh to give an evening feed giving me a break - used Avent manual pump and bottles/teats with no problem - remember to start on No.1 teat and then move up as baby gets used to the flow.

DS1 went from Avent bottles to breast and back again quite happily.

DS2 won't take any bottle at all.

Make from that what you will.............!

A SCBU nurse advised a friend to go to the cheapest pound shop style place she could find and choose the cheapest latex teat (Little Wonders brand round here) to mimic the breast best. Worked for me but you are stuck with narrow ncked bottles. Also liked NUK narrow teats too later on as they were the same as orthontic dummies.

Please don't be disheartened if expressing and bottle feeding don't work out as you imagine though. My girls had fantastic weight gain but I barely got anything with a pump. If their weight gain had been average or lower that could easily have prompted me to abandon BFing for no good reason. Also, when I did get some, DH trying to give it while I was asleep was a pointless waste of time.

Thank you for your advice everyone.

One thing that attracted me to the TT bottles was the variflo teat - seemed more practical than the Avent ones where you have to position the bottle the right way round to get the flow you want. Is the variflo teat useful or do the 'normal' ones work fine?

I don't think you have to position the Avent teats any particular way - I never did anyway. I've never used variflo teats

Do you have to position an Avent Bottle in a particular way? Both my boys took some bottle feeds from Avent ones and we never heard about any positioning you have to do.
I did try variflow and found that when a the baby sucks, they suck so hard that the variflow is just on max all the time.
My mother told me that if you mix feed, when you give a bottle you should pull it back very very slightly, this makes the baby suck harder same as when they are on the breast. I don't know if its true but I did it with mine and they were happy with boob or bottle.
I also had terrible production when I expressed and if a baby had been expecting a good nosh when in daddy's arms he'd have been very disappointed.

I used the Nuk bottles when I was mix feeding with number 3. A bit more expensive but very good- the midwife recommended them; I had used Avent with my first two but found the Nuks better - the teat is much softer and hence more boob like

Would definitely recommend nuk - tried ds2 on 5 different types before them and he rejected them all except nuk. Playtex is also meant to be like breast as has some sort of bag thingy inside which contracts!

The avent variflo teat needs to have the bottle turned to certain locations to change the flow according to the website: here

TT are what we're stuck with as my son has problems wth his tongue even after a tie was cut (twice, actually). He has to combine the slowest, tiny baby easi-vent teats with anti-colic (thing down the middle) bottles, which you aren't meant to do as it slows the flow to a crawl. He chokes on anything else. The consultant told us most parents with severely tt babies end up with this bottle/teat combo. The flow is very slow, so the baby can control it well which is a real issue a lot of the time with breastfed babies, as the technique is different with breast (compress, suck) than bottle (suck, stop flow with tongue).

BUT: they are awful, awful bottles to use for ebm, because the white ring around the neck swells when warm, and as it shrinks down again as the baby suckles it becomes loose on the bottle. So the sodding thing leaks. This is not good news with ff, and a disaster with expressed breastmilk. If I had a choice, I'd can the bloody things. We have tried:

~NUK bottles with ortho teats (glass is obviously BPA free, so we use them to store milk in the fridge now)

~Medela special needs feeder

~breastflow bottles

~MAM bottles

None worked. But our situation is unusual, and I know a lot of bf mums here recommend breastflow (double teats, so the baby has to compress and suck - I found they leaked horribly though, and a lot of people reviewing on Amazon agree) or the special needs feeder which is supposed to encourage sn babies to bf, so is presumably helpful. Many more mothers find MAM is the only teat their exclusively bf babies will take at 5 or 6 months.

If you do decide to go with tt, I posted a 25% discount code on the code section. On the plus side they do now sell BPA free versions, which they didn't before Xmas.

I used tommee tippee closer to nature. Have heard good things about the mam ones too...

Actually the tt heat-expansion problem wouldn't be a problem if you didn't heat the milk, which I wish we never had as he won't accept it cold, now. There's no need to, and in fact it's probably a bad idea with ebm, because it's full of living cells (white blood cells and, according to a link posted this week, stem cells). I don't imagine they like warmth any more than the bottles do.

I have heard from others that breastflow are really good when combining. havent tried them meself though.

another vote for nuk as have used with ds and dd who were both b/f for 5 months with only occaional bottle if i went out. had no probs moving to bottles when weaning either.