Month 7: Bottle Battle

What do you think of when you picture a baby Well, normally, I mean previously, I would have pictured a bottle of milk, a sweet baby sucking hungrily or contentedly on a bottle of milk. That bottle of milk is no longer what I think of now.

Have you ever met a baby who doesn’t drink from a bottle? If you haven’t, please say hello to my darling daughter. Xuan does not drink from the bottle. Actually, “does not” is putting it mildly, what I really mean is “point blank refuses” or “screams at the top of her lungs with fists clenched and eyes squeezed shut if I so much as approach (try to) with a bottle in hand”. To my surprise, there are other babies in the internet who also do not drink from the bottle, much to their desperate mothers’ despair. Yours truly, is one of those desperate mothers.



After checking the trusty internet, one of the suggested strategies in a bottle battle with your baby is to try different bottles and different teats, to find one that the baby likes. In the multi-million dollar baby industry, you can all sorts of bottles and teats you can buy to try if your baby would take to one. Need I mention that most of these brands boast to be close to breast or best like breast and reduces or eliminates colic? I tried Medela, Pureen teat, Pigeon teat, Tollyjoy teat (most teats were too hard), Avent (Xuan had no idea what to do with the extra long teat, do women really have such long nipples?), Tommy Tippee bottle (suppose to be “Closer to Nature” but Xuan was not fooled), Breastflow (two teats, one inside another, but the milk was not flowing for Xuan) and goodness knows what other bottles. The only reaction from Xuan was to scream louder than the previous attempt. I think H was half afraid I would spend thousands of dollars trying every brand in the market, and then some.


Another strategy recommended was to dab a little bit of breastmilk on the bottle to entice the baby to take the teat into the mouth and voila, start sucking! This didn’t work with Xuan because the minute she saw the bottle, she started screaming, and well, you can’t exactly suck on a bottle when you are screaming, can you?


Yet another strategy was to get someone other than the mother to give the baby the bottle. The rationale behind this is because the baby can smell the breastmilk from the mother and would refuse the bottle. Again, it didn’t matter who as holding the bottle, H or my mom or me, Xuan would just start screaming when she saw the bottle.


One strategy I didn’t try as to let Xuan go hungry until she drank from the bottle. Some people swear by this method. One of my friends did this for her son when he was 7 months old, and after one whole day of crying, he finally gave in and drank from the bottle. I could not bring myself to do this. It really breaks my heart to see Xuan cry until she could hardly breathe.


If we ever have another baby (and this is a real question mark at this point!), I would definitely give the baby a bottle from day one, nipple confusion or no nipple confusion. A bottle is so much more versatile. You can feed a baby breastmilk, or formula from a bottle. Someone else can feed the baby. You can even slowly dilute the milk with water to night wean the baby from waking up and feeding at night. There is no way you can dilute breastmilk when feeding the baby directly!


The one advise on our bottle battle I did use from the internet was to forget about the bottle and introduce the sippy cup if the baby is more than 6 months old. Afterall, we are advised to wean the baby from the bottle at 12 months. I am really pinning my hopes on Xuan drinking from a sippy cup eventually. Will give ourselves a couple of months before trying to introduce the sippy cup to Xuan. Hopefully I won’t have to buy all the sippy cups in the market before finding one she will drink from!


Month 7 Milestones:
Xuan started semi-solids this month. Her first taste of food was rice cereal. After 3 days, I gave her carrots and then pumpkin, she loves both.
Xuan started crawling this month...but she can only crawl backwards and ends up crawling in a circle!