giving a bottle

I go back to work in 5 weeks. DD is 7 weeks old. Last week she took a bottle
from my FIL just fine. But since then she wants NONE of that for 2 attempts.
So what I think is necessary to try:

1. Make sure I am not in hearing, smelling or seeing distance.
2. Make sure she is not tired.
3. Try to get her hungry but not ravenous.

The last is the hardest. She does not have "feedings." She has 3 cries;
tired, in pain and the other one. Whenever she does the other one, she is
offered a breast. Then I totally fail to notice if she is eating hungrily or
not...

Any other suggestions on bottle taking?

Thanks

S

Stephanie and Tim wrote:
I go back to work in 5 weeks. DD is 7 weeks old. Last week she took a bottle
from my FIL just fine. But since then she wants NONE of that for 2 attempts.
So what I think is necessary to try:

1. Make sure I am not in hearing, smelling or seeing distance.
2. Make sure she is not tired.
3. Try to get her hungry but not ravenous.

The last is the hardest. She does not have "feedings." She has 3 cries;
tired, in pain and the other one. Whenever she does the other one, she is
offered a breast. Then I totally fail to notice if she is eating hungrily or
not...

Any other suggestions on bottle taking?

What worked for us (definately a YMMV)...

We tried for weeks to have DH offer DS a bottle with no success. What finally worked was ME
offering him a bottle while he was sitting in his vibrating seat. I'd wait until he was in the
perfect mood - smiling and content. I'd sit eye-level with him and talk and smile so that he'd
look at me and coo and 'talk' back and I'd just kind of hold the bottle nipple in his mouth and
he'd just smile around it like it wasn't even there. Sometimes, he'd figure out that there was
milk in it and he'd sort of give it a half-hearted suck. If he got really fussy, I'd take the
bottle away and cuddle him for a minute and then go back to it. Finally, one day he just
finally started sucking in earnest. I gave him a bottle every day to practice with. After he
got good at it, we had to start working at getting him to take the bottle when he wasn't in the
bouncy seat. He's pretty good at it now, but it takes him a long time to finish a bottle. The
most important thing for him was to use a bottle that didn't drip at all. If it would drip into
his mouth without him sucking on it, he would choke and gag and get upset. We found that the
Dr. Brown's bottles were best for that. I also usually tried to wait for a time when I'd see
him sucking on his hands since he obviously had some sort of sucking urge at that time. I'd
just pull his hand out and try to sneak a bottle in.

Manda