My son will be starting daycare in about a month. To ease his transition, I have been training him on a bottle. Before my son was born, I would have never guessed that a baby needed to be trained on a bottle. Don’t babies just like bottles because they have milk in them? Turns out this is not always true. And how many bottle types are there? Turns out there are way more than a few.
So when my son wouldn’t take the first bottle I offered him (we tried several times), I began searching for other options. Honestly, I went a little crazy reading reviews. Every bottle has a lot of hype. And since I setup one-click ordering on my Amazon app, I also went a little bottle happy buying and trying different brands (Medela, Comotomo, Mam, etc.).
At the end of all the bottle madness, the winning bottle for my son was…drumroll please…Nuk. He played with it a bit on the first 2 tries, but the third time was a charm and he latched on no problem. I was actually pretty happy that this was the bottle he preferred. The Nuk bottles have few parts (easy to clean), are reasonably priced, come in a variety of designs (fun for mom!), and are known for supporting healthy oral environment.
The key lesson I was reminded of through this process is that every baby is different. So finding the right bottle often involves a lot of trial and error. The hype that a bottle doesn’t leak, prevents gas, is good for colicky babies, and/or is the “perfect” design really doesn’t matter if your baby won’t latch on. Sooo…the “perfect” bottle for your baby is the one that he or she thinks is perfect.
Here are some other tips for finding the right bottle:
1. If your pump came with bottles, try those first and cross your fingers that your baby loves those. That would make life much easier, wouldn’t it?
2. When you start getting bottle happy like me, give your baby at least 3 days with each type. My son kind of liked the Nuk bottle on Days 1-2. But he took it like it was nobody’s business on Day 3.
3. Think positive and be patient with your baby and yourself. You’re not doing anything wrong if your baby doesn’t like the first few bottles you try.
4. If your baby loves the first bottle you try, you should probably keep that to yourself, especially during your new parent groups :).
5. There are several techniques for teaching your baby to use the bottle (having someone else give the bottle, giving the bottle during a feeding he doesn’t care about, feeding him while in a bouncer, etc.). So I will repeat again that every baby is different and it might just take a while to figure out what works best for him/her. What worked for my son was starting with the nurse/bottle/nurse method. For the first week, I chose one feeding per day to try the bottle. I nursed him on one side, gave him the bottle, and nursed him on the other side. The second week, I substituted that same feeding with the bottle by itself. When he did that, I tried a different feeding time to substitute the bottle. Now I offer him the bottle consistently once a day and he takes it. Thank goodness!
Next transition on the list for my son…getting him to nap in his crib!
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