Breast to bottle

Emily is 5 and 1/2 months old now and has breastfed beautifully even though she was 2 months prem. Early on she was supplemented with a few bottle feeds of expressed breast milk (which she took no problem either) to help her gain weight, but we slowly weaned her off the bottle so that she was exclusively breastfed from about 2 months old - after all the "breast is best" message was drilled into us the whole time. Now we have been trying to reintroduce the bottle to her again with expressed breast milk so that hubby can give her some feeds and we can have a few hours to ourselves and leave Emily with the grandparents. But this has been rather unsuccessful and she refuses to take the bottle to the point she will scream and get really worked up about it. So we end up having to tip the expressed breast milk down the drain and chuck her on the breast. We are using the same AVENT brand bottles and teats we used early on and assumed she would take to them again easily but sadly this is not the case.   Has anyone else had problems getting bubs from breast to bottle and have any suggestions??

I agree with Stacy ... we had to try to get Issy used to a bottle as I was returning to work and DH was going to be the SAHD (and he obv doesnt have boobies).

Anyway ... she wouldnt have a bar of it if I was anywhere remotely close ... so when DH was trying to feed her I would "hide" in the bedroom.

We also tried three different types of bottles she ended up happy with the Nuk ones.

Oh yes ... Issy will take a bottle now whether Im there or not.

I had the exact same problem with Maya! She happily took the odd formula top up in the first few weeks but once my milk settled she was exclusively breastfed. At five months I went back to uni and she went to daycare and she flat out no how no way would take a bottle. She wouldn't take EBM, she wouldn't take formula, she'd drink water from a cup but not anything resembling milk.

It took us till she was 9 months to get her to take a bottle and even then it was a battle (we had to wean at that point for medical reasons so the nurses in hospital basically force fed her with the bottle till she accepted it).

At 5 1/2 mths you could try offering her a cup instead of a bottle, might not work, but worth a go.

The Tommee Tippee bottles are closest to the breast supposedly but you might need to make the hole a bit bigger with a needle coz even the 6 mth+ ones have a very slow flow.

We have just weaned Harry onto a bottle for is day feeds. It took 2 weeks of offering him the bottle at the same time every day before he took it. The first few times he screamed blue murder, I was worried the neighbours might hear him!! But we just kept persevering and eventually he must have decided that he would just give in.
Every baby is different though so that may or may not work. I seriously thought in the first week that he would never take it at all. My DD would never take a bottle so I weaned her onto a cup at 8 months but it took about a month of trying to get her to drink milk out of it. We did the same thing though, tried her at the same time every day and eventually she gave in too!

Good luck

I had exactly the same problem here! Give Emily a bottle with the teat exposed to play with in amongst her toys so she gets familiar with it. Play with it with her, put water in it, shake it about, offer it to her to suckle and make it a bit of game.

Worked a treat for my girl who has been on the bottle for two months now! She used to scream her lungs out when given a bottle, but now she likes to hold her own bottle when feeding!