Hi everybody, Melissa here.
So you've just gotten the hang of breast-feeding...sort of.
And some moms are telling you it's fine to start a bottle and meanwhile others are telling
you that if you do give a bottle, you're baby is going to have nipple confusion and will
start to reject the breast.
What do you do with all of this?
Actually, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends not introducing a bottle until
breast feeding has been clearly established which usually happens at they say at around
three to four weeks of age.
So I think the theory here is that latching on has been established, you're no longer
dealing with engorgement, and you're really in a good rhythm nursing your baby and then
it's fine to introduce the bottle.
This is also a very nice opportunity, if you have a partner, to get your partner involved.
Because some people say that when that first bottle is given that it actually should not
come from the mom.
It should come from someone else.
And they recommend leaving the house or taking a break.
Because they want the baby to experience having the bottle from someone other than the person
whom has been breast-feeding the baby.
So keep that in mind.
And it's a great opportunity to get a break.
It might be a good to have your partner do the last feeding of the day so that you can
go to bed earlier and get a longer stint of sleep.
Maybe you're going to sleep from 9:00pm to 2:00am or if you're really lucky you might
be able to get your partner to do one of the feeds during the night, which would be really
helpful.
But regardless, so keep that in mind in terms of who's going to actually be giving the bottle.
Okay.
Now, there is a bit catch-22 here in terms with delaying giving the bottle to the baby
-you don't wait too long.
I did here from my sister-in-law once that she waited to give her baby a bottle, and
actually she needed to go back to work.
And on her first day back at work she had to leave her child at daycare with a nice
big bottle or two and he wouldn't take it.
He went the whole day without eating.
Eventually, he did start to eat again.
But some babies when this is delayed too long don't want to take the bottle.
And it can become a huge battle.
And that can cause stress for mom because she's worried about getting back to work and
she can't get her baby to take the bottle.
So you really have to gauge all of this.
What I've tended to do with my first two children, I actually did not do a lot of bottles.
The third baby though, unfortunately, was in the NICU for ten days.
And this was a fascinating experience from the nursing perspective.
And here's what I learned.
First of all, those first two days I literally had nothing.
The cluser it was drop less.
I would pump it out, it would be in a bottle, and the NICU nurse would be like, looking
at this bottle, and very politely saying "sure I'll put it in the freezer."
And it looked like nothing.
It was drops of liquid.
It was such a tiny amount.
My milk came in at around day three.
And at that point, I was starting to pump, you know, smaller amounts and gradually it
built up a little bit.
But from the perspective of giving bottles.
It was interesting because my baby had bottles at day one.
There was nothing I could do about it.
He wasn't strong enough to drink from the breast until about day four and then when
I wasn't there at night he had to have a bottle.
So I continued this when I came home and he had a bottle nearly every day.
And I found this so liberating.
I thought it freed me up.
I could pump which was less time consuming than nursing because nursing in the early
weeks is very time consuming.
I could spend time with my older kids and it did not affect this baby at all.
And I actually did the same things for baby three, four, and five.
They always had a bottle at least one bottle every day.
Sometimes I did it at night so that my older children could, you know, I could help getting
them to bed.
It was very, very helpful.
So if you have someone there to help you- your mom, or your babysitter, or you're partner-
consider doing this.
The key thing here to think about is that every baby is totally different.
Some babies you can swap back and forth effortlessly other babies you have to be really, really
careful.
So you have to gauge all of this with your baby.
Now down the line, this issue of, for a nursing mom, of how many bottles to give will remain
very, very important.
You don't want to overdo it.
For working moms, you might need to be doing as much a three bottles a day when you're
away at work.
Now what I found when I was in this situation is that once I was home is that it really
helped to be directly nursing my baby and on the weekends I tried not to do any bottles.
I tried to just keep directly nursing my baby because I found that I produced more milk.
And it helped me and it helped the baby not start to reject the breasts.
Many babies can reject the breasts at six months, at nine months, at twelve months,
if you give bottles all the time; I think they do find it easier.
I think it's less work for them.
It can just sort of flow in and they have to work less in terms exercising their muscles
and their tongue to actually get the milk out.
So you, if you want to keep nursing from the breast, you have to sort of keep track of
this.
And you have to try and limit the amount of bottles of you're doing.
Try one a day even two a day but be careful.
Don't go five days just giving bottles because it might happen that after that your baby
won't want to give the breast.
So you'll sort of learn to keep track of all this on your own.
Be careful with the bottles early on, try to introduce bottles soon enough so that you
won't have a big battle when you do need to give a bottle.
And as time goes on, if you continue to nurse, just try to keep track of the whole thing
and gauge it and make sure that your baby continues to want to nurse directly from your
breast and this whole thing should hopefully work out for you.