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Saturday, September 09, 2006

Bottles, Bottles and Bottles, Oh My!

In a previous posting, I recounted my initial adventures with Avent and its leakly bottle feedings. After basically spilling what seemed like entire bottles of formula/breastmilk drip by drip on my child, I decided I had had it with the Avent bottles. (If only my blog had existed then and I had read A. Eliot's lesson about bottle leak prevention.) Plus the lactation consultant had told me that she wasn't sure if it was my milk supply or my son's latch or lack of a latch thereof that caused the breastfeeding not to work, but either way he wasn't latching on to the Avent bottles very well. I erroneously thought picking out a bottle would be easy. Silly me! I figured I would just get one of every kind and get more of whatever he liked best. I had no idea that there would be so many choices. After all when I had gone with my friend Elle she had told me to pick Avent, so I didn't have to think about it. $50 later my kitchen was covered with packages of bottles. The winner ended up being the regular Dr. Brown's bottles.

"Regular?" you might wonder. What does that even mean? Well, dear readers after having two children, asking numerous pediatricians, leaders of parent groups etc., I finally found the answer from second child's hospital pediatrician who ironically also wasnt able to breastfeed. If you are breastfeeding your child and want to give them a bottle, you need to use a wide mouth bottle. Why is this? The latch, or fishface as I've heard it called, that your child forms with the wide mouth bottle is the same one that she forms when she latches on to the breast. With the regular bottles, the whole nipple, and small "areola" if there is one, go inside of the baby's mouth. For a baby like my first one who had trouble latching, these types of bottles are the best because the bottle just slips inside her mouth and she doesn't have to "latch" on so to speak. My second child uses both kinds depending on what is clean.

For reasons I don't understand some of the brands don't label them as wide mouth (these typically are the store brands) so here’s A. Elliot's rule: If the whole nipple can fit into the baby's mouth it is a regular nipple and not a wide mouth nipple. I hope I cleared it up for you.


Wide mouth bottle on the left. Regular bottle on the right

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posted by Alex Elliot @ 10:00 PM   1 comments
1 Comments:

  • At 9/13/2006 4:29 AM, Blogger bethandrobert said…

    We had a hard time getting Aeli to latch on to her bottle (Medela) until we realized she needed the ENTIRE nipple in her mouth. Once she got that, she was fine! I think at this point that she prefers the sippy cup over anything. And what is it with bottles.. where do they all go? I know we have quite a few, yet I'm always washing the same ones over and over because a clean one can't be found. Or at least it seems that way!

     
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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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