Saturday 30 June 2012

Bottle

Out of curiosity, if anyone is reading this who has children of the small kind or otherwise - at what age did you stop using bottles?
I'm not really sure when I should pack them all away for good. Joseph has two bottles now, one first thing in the morning and one mid afternoon. He has all his squash in a straw cup which he really likes as he can stand up and hold it and walk around with it. I like them because they don't spill, although sometimes they can splash. He also has a small cup of water with his meals most days now and he is doing quite well with it, although I have to maintain a strict hold of it.
We bought some spouts to convert the bottles to spout cups and we had mixed results. Joseph did use the spout cup, but would only do so lying flat on his back and he never stayed lying still long enough to drink much. In the end I resorted to giving him a drink as I changed his nappy which turned into a bit of a faff around and his liquid intake was rather dependant on how many poops he did in one day.
At this point I tried him on a straw cup and he's been much better.
I did once try and put his milk in one and it didn't really work. He probably drank a fair bit of it in the end, but most of it ended up dribbled down his front. We are long past the age where it is acceptable for him to spend the day smelling faintly of cheese and I don't fancy clearing up all that milky drool on a regular basis.
Today I tried a new approach. I put the spout and plastic handles onto the bottle as I had done before for giving him squash but I put milk into it instead. He recognised the bottle but was initially wary of the spout. I put on an episode of Chugginton and settled down with him on the sofa as a cuddle usually helps. He took a sip from the spout and looked really confused.
He drank very very slowly, only taking small sips and constantly holding the bottle away from him and looking at the spout. It took the entire ten minute episode for him to get through the bottle, as the end credits rolled there was a little left and he gave up, got up and started running around.
I'm quite happy with this, I thought he might just reject it completely. I think I'll persevere with the spouts for a while and see if he starts getting on better with just using a normal cup.
He's funny with a normal cup. He sees Andy and I using them and he seems to know the theory of how it works but in actual practice the result is not so good. Generally he ends up trying to tip the cup a little too far and ends up with far too much in his mouth and it dribbles out into his bib.  Obviously, I'm much better at controlling the cup than he is but he does not like to yield total control and wants to hang on to the cup. Obviously this is a bad idea and I have no intention of cleaning up large puddles of slightly crumby water after every meal time.
I suppose the next issue is that even once he's no longer using a teat bottle, how much milk does he still really need? He gets plenty of calcium from his diet now - he'd eat his own body weight in fromage frais given half a chance and he does like melted cheese.

No comments:

Post a Comment