Bottle feeding - spitting milk

[haidri]

Hi lovelies, my baby girl is just over three weeks old now. She's on formula [due to me having delayed lactation as I had heavy blood loss & a transfusion shortly after]. Originally she had a newborn closer to nature tommee tippee teat which was the smallest size. However with this I noticed she was gulping a lot of milk & gasping loads! Despite me pace-feeding, she was gasping for breaths so I purchased the Vari-flow teat.. but with this, she's not only gasping and gulping, but she's now spitting milk from the side of her mouth while drinking.

I'm unsure of what to do?

Hi!
I was in exactly the same position as you recently with my little boy. He was taking around 40 mins for a feed - he would fall asleep at the bottle as the size 1s were too slow for him.

I also bought variflow teats at about 5 weeks old and the exact same happened as you described. I started off limiting him to about 4 or 5 suckles at a time and it still happened, but it was less. I think it's just a case of them getting used to it, he dribbled out the milk A LOT for about a week straight because he is quite a greedy baby so I imagine the milk was coming out way too fast and he wasn't used to it. I made around an extra ounce or 2 during this time to make up for the milk lost otherwise he was still hungry at the end of a feed. I suggest making sure the bib/Muslin cloth is properly in place too otherwise you will be changing clothes at every feed... I made that mistake far too many times🤣

Anyway, after some persevering, he now drinks a whole bottle without wasting a drop, unless he is full of course!

Another option I have heard of is using a pin to prick a small hole into the size 1 teats to make the flow a bit faster, but not to the extreme of the variflow teats.

Hope it works out for you!