Goodbye Bottles

Our original plan was to stop using bottles at 12 months, but at the one-year doctors appointment they were very underweight, so that plan went out the window. They weren’t eating solids that well, and there’s nothing like whole milk for fatty calories. A bottle of milk is 150 calories, so three bottles a day made up half their daily intake.

The kids are now sixteen months, and I was starting to get anxious about them still being on bottles. I’ve given the “you need to get your baby off the bottle” lecture a million times, so I was starting to feel like a bad parent. There are four main reasons to stop bottle use:

1. Milk bottle caries: toddlers let the nipple sit in their mouth without sucking, and the milk just pools.
2. Open bite malformation: also a problem with prolonged pacifier use.
3. Cows milk anemia: milk has no iron, and the kids who drink a ton of milk are too full to eat other foods, so they get severely anemic. I admitted two kids during my residency who had a hemoglobin of four all because of cows milk.
4. Toddler stubbornness: the later you wait to stop the bottle, the harder it gets.

Sorry for the gross pictures, but I literally see those teeth at least once a week.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to stop their bottles cold turkey. Immediately, their milk consumption went down to almost zero. They just weren’t used to drinking milk from a cup. At one point, Eleanor saw her seven-month-old cousin drinking milk and she started crying and pointing at the bottle. We quickly moved her to another room and did our best to distract her. Miranda had a bout of severe constipation because her liquid consumption was cut by more than half. I tried my best to give them cheese and yogurt so they would still get some calcium.

After a few days, though, I guess they must have realized that the only milk they would get would be from a cup, and they both starting drinking their milk cups. Whew!