Back when Reilly was three-months-old, we started the process of teaching her to take milk from a bottle. She stubbornly refused the bottle at every feeding, crying her little guts out until mom proffered her breast. Yes, we tried starving Reilly out for a feeding, thinking she would give in to her hunger and concede to the bottle. Nope. We tried about a dozen different bottles, thinking that was the issue. That didn't really help either. This continued for a full month.
Reilly ended up taking a Dr. Brown's bottle, which was unfortunate, since we had a few dozen Avent bottles and an Avent sterilizer that we had received at our shower. I laugh at naive Brian who thought he would be the one that got to choose the bottle his baby would take. HA! Anyway, I forget whether it was Shawn or me who finally got her to take the bottle, but I do remember we used a bait-and-switch method devised by Shawn's mom, in which we would let Reilly have her pacifier, and once she was sucking away on that, we would quickly pop out the paci and pop in the bottle.
We are currently struggling from a similar transition problem, while trying to get Reilly to switch from taking milk in a bottle to having her milk in a sippy cup. When I give Reilly water in a sippy cup, she tilts it back and chugs it like a college student at the keg. When I give her milk in a sippy cup, she sucks it into her mouth, and then after making a face, opens her mouth and lets the milk dribble down her chin. One would think that milk is milk, and that Reilly would recognize the taste of it regardless of the vessel it came in. Wrong.
Yesterday, I saw a woman with her one-year-old daughter at the park. The young girl was chugging milk out of a sippy cup. When I asked the mother how she got the girl to take milk from the sippy, she looked at me a little askew and then said, "I just put milk in there and handed it to her."
It was my turn to look at her askew. "That's how I thought it would work."
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