Sunday, January 23, 2011

Bye, Bye, Dr. Brown.

This weekend, I decided to whip out the sippy cup for Naomi, seeing as she's getting a bit older and this is probably a good time to allow her to get comfortable seeing it and handling so she can, someday, drink from it.

I filled it with formula for her lunch time feeding and nonchalantly handed it to her as she lay on the floor (I let her hold her bottles for some feedings), leaving the room momentarily to check the laundry.

When I returned, two ounces were gone.

I know it doesn't seem like much, but it's kind of a big number, considering she only drinks five ounces per feeding. I stared at her in awe as she sucked the other three ounces down in only a few minutes. I picked up the empty sippy in disbelief and stared back down at my smiley, giggly baby girl still sprawled on the floor. I was slightly baffled because, according to my recollection, it took Cub at least ten minutes to get a mere ounce down when he first started on sippy cups.

And then it dawned on me that our little lady has been a bottles-only baby for the past three months. And, this particular Nuk cup is awfully similar to a bottle. Cub was still breastfed when we introduced the sippy and while he did well with bottles, he only took them a few times a week. And sippies took some time for him to get used to (until he was weaned to a bottle at eight months--then he took to sippies quickly). Naomi chugged her sippy down like it was no problem.


Sneaky lady.

So, I'm throwing this out there: Does bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding affect the speed at which a baby masters the art of the sippy cup? I'm curious as to what your experience has been. My hypothesis suggests that there is a potential correlation between bottle-feeding and sippy cup skillz.

Either that or my child is part vacuum.

What do you think?

6 comments:

  1. I think she's too cute! :) Olivia drank from that exact same sippy cup. She was a bottle baby so the transition to the sippy cup was fairly easy for her. Yay for Naomi!

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  2. I'm not sure it has anything to do with breastfeeding. S took to a sippy very early and with no issues. E is 10 months old and has been trying to learn a sippy (multiple different ones) for 3 months now. She gets so mad, she throws it. The girl is obsessed with bottles. They are both breastfed babies. I think it has to do with how stubborn they are. ;)

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  3. My son was exclusively bottle fed due to the fact that he was a preemie, but we still had an awful time getting him to take a sippy cup. I can remember panicking and thinking he would be on the bottle forever, and the truth is (don't shake your finger at me people) he was, with the doctor's permission, still taking one bottle a day at 17 months. He was very small, and just couldn't afford to lose that feeding. Eventually, as with all things, he transitioned to the sippy cup, and it was the NUK cups that got us there.

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  4. No real opinion here...Riggs is breastfed with a few bottles a week. For him it was a matter of which cup I used...started him on the Nuby and he couldn't get a thing out of (nor could I for that matter...I had to practically bite the spout to get anything out!), but then I switched to a playtex cup with a straw and he took to that really quickly. Right now I just use it for water, so I'll be interested to see how he responds once it's milk in there...wondering if I need to start offering those bottle feedings in the cup only?

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  5. Oh man. The sippy cup. I was just working on a little post about this topic myself!

    E is exclusively breastfed (her choice...she is anti-bottle), but she also will take the sippy cup like a dream...if it is filled with her preference of majorly watered down juice. If I put in some breastmilk--NOPE! Hates it. I have no idea what to do. She can't nurse forever, and I can already tell a decrease in my milk supply as she nears one year. Ugh. Lost over here.

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  6. Leslie, I say if he likes the straw cups, maybe start giving him a feeding or two with them (if you were asking for my opinion ... if you weren't, disregard this comment and please accept my apologies!!). It definitely wouldn't hurt anything! When we introduced straw cups to Cub, he hated them. It was a bit of a battle because they leaked everywhere, too. Then we realized he could drink out of a normal straw just fine, it was just the cups he hated! So, we never really did the straw cup thing in our house and just kept stepping up the sippy cups and giving him normal straws to drink out of every once and a while (and, of course, eventually drinking out of a regular cup). The Nalgene sippy is our best friend right now. So, I think a lot of it is figuring out what works best for your little one. If I've learned anything, it's that they're all very different. :) Good luck!

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