Help! Baby won’t take a bottle

[HillbillyBackstroke]

My baby is 5 months old and in six weeks I need to do some KIT days at work. Baby will be left at home with DH who will need to do 2-3 feeds for each day I work.

But he won’t take a bottle! I probably didn’t start trying early enough as I didn’t want to disrupt breastfeeding. He took a bottle on two separate occasions as a newborn but since then won’t entertain it. He won’t suck at all and just cries. We’ve been trying for around two months now.

We’ve recently been trying cup feeding with the Tommee Tippee transition cup with no success either. Open cup feeding won’t work because he’s so wriggly!

We’ve tried both expressed milk and formula and it doesn’t make any difference. We’ve also tried me feeding and DH feeding but no difference.

Does anyone have any advice?

As a last resort, DH can drive to my workplace so I can breastfeed but I really don’t want to have to do that.

i was in the same situation. In hindsight I worried about it a lot more than I probably needed to.
My baby drank water ok from a sippy cup but I did BF in the morning just before I left, at bedtime and then lots of times through the night to catch up. I provided expressed breast milk for the day time to be offered but he refused.
my boobs were bursting by the end of the day but we got back in sync after the day.
it was the same process when I started work properly at 8/9 months but he was eating more by then.
Hope this reassures you.

At 6.5 months, he should be taking some solids which will cover one feed. And if he does miss 2 other feeds by refusing the bottle, he will just feed more at night (hard for you, totally fine for him).

I went back to work full time at 7 months. Baby didn't love a bottle. He would take it as last resort, maybe 2-3oz, so he didn't go hungry in the day but then was glued to me all morning, evening and 2-3 times a night.