My wife and I are really struggling to get our 3 and a half month old boy to feed from a bottle. He feeds happily from the breast.
In his first few weeks he quite willingly took small feeds of expressed milk or formula, but for a while now he just refuses. Sometimes he begins quite willing but rarely goes beyond about 5 minutes before suddenly refusing. He typically screws up his face, cries and writhes as if being waterboarded! My wife wants to stop breast feeding at six months and as that deadline looms we're becoming concerned that he just won't be ready to transition to bottles only.
While all the other mums in our NCT group are having having half days and days out of the house while the dads bottle feed, or going on date nights while grandparents bottle feed, my poor wife can barely leave the house for an hour. She's knackered and needs a break but the boy just will not take the bottle. Last weekend we figured 'if he's hungry enough he'll take it' and my wife went out to meet a friend for 3 hours. It almost killed me! I managed to get 70ml into him in 3 hours and it was hideous!
We're trying to make it fun and light, we're waiting until he's happy, hungry but not starving, being consistent with milk temperature and sterilizing the living daylights out of the Tommy Tippees! We've tried every different position you can think of but he's like a horse refusing to jump. We're concerned that our repeated efforts to get him to mixed feed are building up negative associations for him with the bottle. Sometimes he starts getting agitated and crying just as it touches his lips.
Frankly we've read so much about how to do this and think we've tried all the most common advice, so I'm not sure whether I'm expecting answers, maybe just some reassurance from others who have been where we are and for whom things eventually worked out. (If you've been here and it didn't work out, we don't want to hear from you!)
Any useful ideas or experiences people?