Thursday, May 30, 2013

Bye-bye bottle!

We've finally done it! Our house is void of bottles, bottle-washers, bottle drying racks and cooler bags! NO MORE BOTTLES!!

Can you tell how excited I am about this? Having said that, though, I want to point out that it was far from seamless.

Between day care and our house, the bottle had become a crutch. Sully is upset, get the bottle. Little bit of a fussy-pants? Get the bottle. I've got to trim his nails and clean his ears - get the bottle! As you can see, we had to learn new methods of coping to accompany our lack of bottles.

My plan was to wean down the bottle feedings to morning and night only for a while, and then go from there. Well... that didn't really happen. How could it when we were using it as a bandage to fix every little issue? I would say to myself, "Sullivan is only one; we've got plenty of time. I won't let him suck on a bottle when he's two." It's probably true. The clincher, though, was hearing my co-worker talk about weaning her son off of the bottle within a week or so. With no fight and no fuss. What? He's not even one-year-old!

Okay, we're doing this. Cold-turkey, the bottles were gone. We didn't wean and we didn't temper down, we just thrust a sippy cup in his hands and let him figure it out. We did it that way with Scarlett and she was fine. But this is Sully we're talking about. Our boy, our fusser, our whiner. The one who never does ANYTHING the easy way. Nope, he wanted nothing to do with it. He would willingly drink from a sippy cup, unless it contained milk. Sully pitched that crap right back to us, literally pitched it, in an often violent and emotional throw.

No worries, we've finally reached a comfortable stage. Sully started drinking milk again within a week, this time from his sippy cup. He doesn't love the idea of waking up to no bottle, but I rest easier knowing that he will soon forget that he even had a bottle.