My little one turned one and half-year-old last month and also made an important transition. He made mommy proud by starting to drink milk from his favorite Baa Baa Black Sheep cup instead of a bottle. As he crossed this milestone I couldn't help but reminisce about the various sweet moments we enjoyed during our bottle feeding journey. I believe that a moment shared with others is a moment better lived so here I am sharing my memories with you.
We started bottle feeding when my lo was 2 months old majorly because I needed to overcome the exhaustion of constant feeding. He took the bottle quite easily, thanks to this amazing
Natural feeding bottle from Chicco we used. He never once complained or appeared fussy about getting the bottle. New mommies, go ahead and give it a try!! This was the start of more than a year-long association with milk bottles.
For the first 8 months, it was either me or los grandparents who fed him through the bottle. My dear husband was completely convinced that lo will refuse his meal if he saw that the one feeding him isn't his mom or one of his grandparents 😄😄. In the 9th month, we had to move away from our hometown. We were visiting my SIL before the move when she saw me warm los milk bottle in the microwave. Surprisingly for me, she said that microwave should never be used for warming milk bottles (Thanks, Ritu Di for your ever kind way of sharing your wisdom). This triggered my search for an alternative and I discovered that there are milk warmers made specifically for helping moms like me.
Meanwhile, the change of city meant that the grandparents couldn't be around anymore. So, my husband had no choice but to share the responsibility of feeding our lo 😜. And I, being the nice wife, assigned the midnight dream feeding duty to the father 😝. And thus lo started sharing his midnight meal-time with his father. Btw, this helped lo and my husband bond so much more than before. My husband would tell me stories of how our lo woke up and wanted to play in the middle of the night and often I would find lo curled up in his father's arms in the morning. It is the cutest sight ever.
After the 10th month, my lo started to communicate his needs by using hand gestures. It was during this period that he started pointing towards the kitchen if he was hungry. Once we took him to the kitchen, he would point to his milk bottle and ask for milk. He learned to say 'dudhu' around his first bday and could ask for milk without even going to the kitchen. It warms my heart infinitely to watch him grow through these little stages. It was around this time that I noticed his milk bottles were regularly unfinished. Although we had switched to a bottle appropriate to his age and he was feeding for a long enough time, he couldn't finish the bottle. After much deliberation and reading, I decided to switch the brand of his bottles and bought
Avent bottles. Voila, he started drinking up the complete milk. So dear fellow mommies, don't hesitate to change the brand of milk bottles in case your lo is fussing about the feed.
We were completely comfortable with the bottle feeding routine and lo was even showing interest in the procedure to prepare his milk bottle. I was about to hand over the responsibility of milk preparation to him 😎 when my mom suggested that I should start thinking about weaning lo from the bottle. Once a child reaches 2 years of age, his attachment towards the bottle as well as his opinion of the world around him grows strong enough for him to start resisting any changes. This worried me because he was just learning to drink water from a glass and could only finish two sips at a time by pouring those two sips of water on himself 🙈. If not the bottle then what!!
While I had started reading about weaning off the bottle, I remembered that one of my friend's elder sis (shout out to Payal and Reena Di) had once told me that she fed milk to her kids using a straw. I thought, why not give this a try! I got a straw, put it in a cup, added water and gave it to lo. Duh, turns out infants don't know how to sip from a straw!! So the first step in the weaning off journey was to teach lo to sip from a straw. It took him quite a while and finally, he learned after watching his cousins drinking milk using a straw (thank you dear Veda and Vihaan) 😇. So I started switching his bottle feeds with straw cup feeds one at a time.
This seemed easy until the point he was using the bottle only for his dream feeds. One, during the afternoon nap and the other during his early morning sleep. Now, I was rattling my brain about how to eliminate these two feeds. I obviously couldn't switch to straw and cup for dream feeds so I thought I will just not give him the bottle and see how it goes. Turned out, he woke up at the exact time he was expecting his bottle 😞. This made his afternoon nap shorter and my mornings started earlier than usual. This clearly wasn't working so I gave up on this idea after 2 days as I thought I was keeping the child hungry.
It so happened that lo caught a stomach infection and the doctor strictly advised against feeding bottles. I had no choice but to stop giving him the dream feeds. For about 5 days, his schedule was off track and he was sleeping and waking up at weird hours. But magically, on the 6th day, he took his afternoon nap and woke up at his usual hour in the morning. Turns out, he didn't actually need the bottles but was getting up out of habit. Now, it has been more than 10 days and the kiddo has stopped taking his stomach infection meds as well as his feeding bottles. Mommy couldn't have been happier (both his and mine). As I put the bottles away and said goodbye to a long companion in my kiddo's journey, I was literally beaming with pride at the grown-up toddler 😆
