At the advent of this paternity project adventure, two things kept me awake at night. Ironically, the first was the spectre of sleep deprivation. The second was whether I’d master bottle-feeding. I definitely had the pre-bottle-feeding blues.
“How’s the bottle-feeding going?” has been the tentative question I’ve been put on numerous occasions by other new parents. Tentative, because they know that as a dad on paternity leave, bottle-feeding has to work, elsewise multiple daily trips to mummy’s office for pit stops would be required. Strike that, I’d be forced to camp outside her office. Or, if I was lucky, as the temperatures tumble, her employer might sympathetically stow me away along a backwater corridor so that my wife could sweep by every now and then to deliver milkie top-ups.
To the question of how’s it going, I give the firm reply: “the headline is: we’ve got bottle-feeding to work” but quickly follow on with “but it took a lot of time, patience and sitting through crying, struggling and watching my daughter develop her ‘arched-back writhing technique'”. (I’d also like to point out that my daughter still has her ‘moments’. Or, more truthfully, I have my moments of misreading what she’s after.) I’m in no way making out that I’m some kind of hero who is alone willing to battle through the screams. I just feel that it’s important to report the struggle behind the triumph. And to me it feels like a triumph.
I suspect that what works for one child won’t necessarily work for another. I mean, why would it? We all approach bottle-feeding differently, and importantly we all start from a different point of departure. We have, for starters, different children, temperaments (ours and our babies), babies with different feeding preferences and so forth. Our reasons for bottle-feeding are also likely mixed. So, I hope you take these thoughts in the spirit of sharing my experience. For what it’s worth, these are the six things that helped me to get the bottle feeding functioning.
Start off expecting to fail. I took the view that failure was a possibility – if I wasn’t willing to keep trying with my daughter. To begin with, she didn’t happily take to the bottle. It took her time to get her mechanics right. It took her daddy even longer to get the positioning right. It was a case of trial and fail and trial and eventually succeed.
Wear ear plugs. There was a lot of crying in the beginning. A level of crying that cut through to a part of the brain that elicits thoughts like “I’m not going to be able to make this work: I’m failing and will widely be seen as a failure. I’m letting team dad down.” If thoughts like these even start to seep into your consciousness, you clearly need to ‘take all necessary steps’. This is important because if you are in sole charge and mum is not around to step in with the breast, the pressure starts to rise uncomfortably fast. So, don’t let it: pop in a pair of ear plugs before you begin the feed. I did this every time for the first four days. It means you’re focused on feeding, not distracted by their (probably justified) wailing. Then I realised I didn’t need them anymore. A milestone which felt pretty damn good to pass.
Mimic postures that your baby is used to when breastfeeding with mum. I observed the position my daughter liked to feed with her Mor (mum). And then I plagiarised it. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that in the bottle feeding beginning, my daughter found it more comfortable to feed in a manner she was used to. She has subsequently branched out to feeding whilst laying down on her playmat, or in her pram. When she’s lying flat, it’s best to supervise her closely so that she doesn’t gulp down too eagerly and choke. That’d be not so good.
You might need to wait until they’re really sure they’re hungry. I’ve found that my daughter responds to the offer of a bottle in three ways: 1) out and out rejection (not hungry); 2) circular tongue movement but not really drinking (testing out whether she is actually hungry, but we both know she isn’t); 3) proper slurpy gulps (the real deal). The first two options aren’t particularly rewarding for either of you. Bypass them by not jumping in to offer the bottle too early in the face of some I-want-food-like sounds. I’ll be upfront, my ability to hold back is entirely dependent on how long it’s been since the last feed and how quickly I’d like to bring the curtain down on the crying (quiet bookshops or restaurants tends to make me more trigger-bottle happy).
Mor (mummy) doesn’t bottle feed. Only daddy. I can’t say how critical this step is, but by making the distinction, there was never any confusion for my daughter about whether she could expect a nipple or the plastic imposter. It was always the genuine, authentic lux treatment with Mor and the synthetic, cheap imitation knock-off works with daddy. Remember: confusion kills comfortable consumption, kids.
Be patient. And then some. As I said above, the headline is that I got our daughter to bottle feed within a day. But the backstory is more long winded. And tiring. However, I was so elated by being able to feed my daughter (thereby demonstrating to myself that I could provide my daughter with the basics), that I tend to overlook the (mostly past) difficulties.
My daughter got sufficient food on day one, but it wasn’t until day four of day feeds (evening and night feeds were via breast) that she was more comfortable and I could survive without earplugs – the bellweather of indicators!
Good luck.
The Paternity Project 