First of all, anyone who is traumatized by such words as “breastmilk” and “breastfeeding”, please stop reading now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Okay, now that we only have the real troopers reading this… Chase doesn’t do well with bottle-feeding. Not that I am planning on stopping the breastfeeding thing anytime soon, but every once in a great while, we can’t or don’t want to stop everything for feeding time, every two hours or less. Therefore, when Chase was about 2 months old, we tried feeding him a formula bottle to see how that would work out, and he made a pickle-face and cried when he tasted that fake stuff. Next I pumped a bottle, which takes forever and is no small feat for me. Chase worked diligently to extract milk from that thing, but didn’t seem to get one bit, and wasn’t fond of our attempts to just squirt milk into his mouth from the bottle. So then I figured the nipple hole wasn’t big enough, so I cut an “x” hole in the tip, and plenty of milk came out of there. Bingo– A bit of freedom!
So a few nights ago, Pace and I decided to be adventurous and go on a “long date”, meaning that we went to dinner and a movie (Superman Returns, which was okay but too long). Cousin Tiffany Keck was kind enough to watch Chase during that time, and did a great job. I had prepared the “x hole” bottle beforehand, with pumped milk for when he would get hungry. Pace and I had a nice date together, although most of the time I was wondering to myself whether Chase was taking that bottle. When we went to pick up Chase afterwards, Tiffany said that he had been fine but hadn’t drunk even an ounce of the bottle. So I feel that in the future we will just have to do dinner OR a movie, and make sure that the movie is less than 2 hours at that… A friend of ours said that they had to try several types of bottles on her kid, and then there was finally one that he would take… Maybe by the time we’re through having kids, we’ll have figured this out.