Hi all, we've got a 1-year-old girl who is already fully weaned on solid adult food - she eats absolutely anything except formula - but still breastfeeds briefly before going sleep. She has already kicked off dummies (6mo), her finger/thumb (11mo) and bottles (4mo) all on her own to our surprise. She has been drinking sterilised water from her non-spill cup for many months without any issues. However, my wife need to start a number of medication very soon that absolutely don't allow breastfeeding at all. We've started trying to give our daughter cow's milk a couple of days ago, but she absolutely dislikes the taste, will spit and slap the cup away and start to cry if we try give it to her the second time. We've still got a large stock of frozen breast milk, so we want to slowly wean her off breast milk onto cow's milk using this stock.
Unfortunately she refuses to drink from the bottle even if there's 100% breast milk inside it, she cries and slaps the bottle away hard before she allows the teat in her mouth. She will only drink from her no-spill cup, we tried putting cow's milk in, she wasn't fooled and nearly stopped drinking from this cup when we went back to water. We don't want her to negatively associate her cup with milk, it's hard enough to get her to drink anything.
She will not go to sleep unless she's on the breast for 5 minutes, she only drinks a tiny bit of milk, uses the nipple more like a dummy before falling asleep. She was awake and crying for 4 hours last night until we gave in and gave her the breast, and she promptly fell asleep after 1 minute on the nipple.
How do we get her to sleep without needing to breastfeed/suck on the nipple? How do we try to get her to like drinking from the bottle? We've tried 5 different bottles with "natural" teats, but she immediately slaps bottles away on sight. She also refuses dummies and fingers/thumbs, and will cry if we try a second time.
Our current plan is to buy a different brand of no-spill cup (similar to what she has), try 100% breastmilk in that, if she takes it, then to wean her off breastmilk and onto cow's milk slowly. However we would like advice on the best way to do this as I doubt this will work, as I think she has associated drinking from the breast to sleep.
Thanks in advance for reading this far!