weaning off of bottle??

[smudgedlipstick]

I am starting to think I need to wean my toddler off of her bottle. She has just turned two and has one tommee tippee bottle for bedtime, I know it sounds silly but I don't know how to stop this! She has a full set of beautiful teeth and am worried that she is going to start damaging them if she keeps having a bottle. She is dairy free and has a soy milk bottle with 4 sachets of movicol in her night time bottle, this is why we haven't done this already, we read night time story then I put her down with her bottle and leave and she goes off with her bottle. Any suggestions on what I can do to get rid of the bottle?

She should be brushing her teeth after the last bottle. It's really bad for her teeth otherwise. I would split it from bedtime and have the milk downstairs in a cup and then do a new bedtime routine not involving it.

She had her bottle with her story and we brushed teeth before bed tonight, and put her down without her bottle and she has gone straight to sleep. I tried her with a few different juice bottles and she wouldn't drink from them. Any ideas for what bottle would be better than a baby bottle?

My two year old has his bedtime milk just in an open beaker now. Before that he used a sippy cup. He was a bottle refuser though so never had one to give up!

We just went cold turkey with the bottles. We had a few nights and mornings of complete refusal past the first sip but after a few days she started accepting the morning milk. She never took the bedtime one back up however. We started with a sippy cup and then when she was happy with that moved to a straw cup (she has it sitting on our bed in the morning so an open cup isn't an option I'm willing to entertain). She was 16mo at the time and couldn't use straw cups at that point, otherwise I would have gone with them from the start.
How attached to her milk is she? i.e. would she be fussed if she didn't get it anymore? If she doesn't love it that much it might be worth taking a more softly softly approach than we took as you're reliant on it for the medicine. I don't know anything about Movicol, but could it be mixed with milk over cereal at breakfast if necessary? Or mixed with weak juice? (Not a juice fan personally, but it has its uses)

The movicol is chocolate flavoured and as she has to have quite a large amount giving it to her any other form isn't really possible. She doesn't have any other milk bottles during the day and as she is off all dairy I don't want to take away her nighttime milk. She drinks from straw cups and the sort of sport top style bottles during the day no problems, we sort of missed the sippy cup stage she never really took to them. It went quite well with her having her bottle before bed so now it's just to work out what else she will drink it from

We moved to a non spill tippy cup. Thought he'd hate it, but he didn't bat an eyelid. He had visited friends the day before and seen them with the same cups and thought they were cool. It was his 2nd birthday.

So perhaps go cold turkey on the bottles offering a straw cup instead but give her chocolate movicol-laced porridge (made with the soy milk obviously) for breakfast if she refuses? Before we gave up the bottles I tried offering a sippy then reverting to the bottle if she refused as I also felt it was important she get some into her. She wasn't stupid and quickly realised if she said no to the sippy, she'd get her bottle anyway. Hence why we took a harder line, and it only took a few days to fall in line when she realised it was that or nothing. She dropped her bedtime milk because she just wasn't fussed about it, but loves her morning milk and I don't see us removing that anytime soon if we wanted too!

As an aside, dairy/milk/milk alternatives aren't completely essential to their diet particularly after 2, they can get everything they need from the rest of their food (provided they aren't a fussy eater of course!). We eat a mostly veggie diet (some fish/meat once a week) so DD does eat cheese and eggs, but her morning milk is almond milk. She gets plenty of calcium through her wider diet (although almond milk has plenty of calcium too), and we make up the 'lost' fat content with avocados, seeds and nut butters through the day. It is completely workable to give them a good diet without dairy/dairy alternatives, although I totally understand in your circumstance it's a convenient way of getting the medicine into her.

The other option is to just carry on with the bottles and try again in 6 months when you could do a whole 'bottle fairy' routine and have her choose a special 'milk cup'? As long as she drinks down the milk fairly quickly and has her teeth brushed after then any damage would be negligible in those additional few months. It's not unusual for a 2yo to still have a bottle, even if it is against advice (which is very unrealistic IMO, no way would my DD have been able to give them up at a year!).