Because it's messy, tiring, time-consuming, frustrating, and over and above everything else, mostly unsuccessful.
But it wasn't always this way. Let me backtrack a little.
We started bottle-feeding Baby K at around the four week mark, and, as babies that age are (with their insane incredible instinct to suckle), she bottle-fed like a dream. She could easily down 60ml in 5-10 minutes. And would still want more. And she looked cute doing it, too. Everyone wanted to bottle-feed her, from The Hubs to her Godma to my sister-in-law.
But then, at around the 2.5 month mark, Papa got too busy at work to give her her usual 11pm feed. We didn't think too much of it, thinking that skipping a day or two wouldn't hurt, especially since she loved her milk so much. But the day or two turned into two weeks, and suddenly, she turned 3 months old.
And as everyone who did their homework on bottle-feeding knows (ie
not Baby K's unsuspecting parents), that's the age when breastfed babies start developing a preference for the nipple over the bottle. I mean, who wouldn't, right? You get milk on tap, served at just the right temperature, and the vessel it comes in is oh-so cuddly and warm.
So at the ripe old age of 3 months, Baby K started asserting her right to make decisions. She rejected her milk if it came out of a bottle.
We had to start over, no two ways about it. Papa tried feeding her every time he could - nights, weekends, public holidays, etc. But that yielded no results. So the job went to Mummy - naturally right, since she's at home with Baby K all of the time anyway.
Hang on a minute there, you say. I'm a stay at home mum who's basically breastfeeding her child. Why do I need to bottle-feed her?
Because, according to The Hubs, therein lies our ticket to Date Night. Being able to bottle-feed means we can leave her with a babysitter for an extended period of time, i.e. 3 hours or longer without worrying she would starve. In fact, he says, this was the key to having people (by people he means either my mum or his mum) be willing babysitters.
So try I did. Every day I offered her the milk, varying the time, position she was in, heating the teat/not heating the teat, scalding/not scalding the milk before storing it, giving it to her before/after feeds, asking different people to give it a shot, tried it in different areas of our home etc. It took a while, and eventually it was a change of teat that did it, but finally she was taking milk from the bottle again. Hooray!!!!
Or so I thought.
"I don't like this teat." Those were the words that undid all the hard work I had put in. Because it was uttered by a VIP, we changed the teat. As it turned out, Baby K rejected the milk every time it came in the old teat. And try as we might, we couldn't coax her into drinking again, even when we switched back to the second teat.
Bitter and angry, and still being pestered to continue to try bottle-feeding Baby K, who continued to scream, squirm away from and refuse the bottle, I decided to give a hand-me-down teat a shot.
And lo and behold! Baby K was intrigued by the new teat, and after a few times of playing with it, finally drank some milk! I was overjoyed. At last, my hard work, which had been previously undermined by some flippant remark and had to be started from scratch again, was showing some progress.
And progress we did. Baby K regularly finished the 40-50ml of milk I offered at each feed - by no means a lot of milk, but infinitely more than what she took previously, and I was happy again. No more fighting, no more dribbling of milk by the side of the mouth, nor milk splotches all over the floor, nor sticky hands from dried-up milk. Just gloriously empty (or near-empty) milk bottles to wash.
But more trouble loomed ahead. By then, I had been the only one trying to feed her with any success for so long, that I became only one who COULD feed her with any success. The Hubs, MIL, my sister - no one could feed her without suffering the pain of rejection.
AND WHAT GOOD WOULD THAT BE, IF THE ONLY PERSON WHO COULD BOTTLE FEED HER IS THE SELF-SAME PERSON WHO COULD MORE EASILY, NOT TO MENTION OODLES MORE HAPPILY, BREASTFEED HER? The words "Defeating the Purpose" hovered menacingly over my head like a terrible dark cloud every time he mentioned the disgusting "B" word.
And with that, this nasty (and to me unnecessary) duty was handed back to The Hubs.
Aside: Somewhere in the midst of all this I decided to take the advice from my mummies' forum and try the sippy and Doidy cups. After all, why bother with the bottle when you had to wean her off it eventually? Might as well skip to the next stage. That hasn't gotten very far, though, because she hasn't really mastered the Doidy and isn't very interested in the sippy, but at least we have a back-up plan now. (Still, not good enough for The Hubs because they aren't familiar tools with which the older folks use to feed babies.)
After some laboured weeks, The Hubs made a breakthrough and Baby K started accepting him back into her rarefied circle of exclusive bottle-feeders. Which was great! But the not-so great thing was, now that he was redeemed, he started to get on my back again.
I had to continue bottle-feeding Baby K so that she wouldn't "forget how to do it", never mind whether she actually enjoyed drinking from the bottle. Never mind whether there's a point in doing so or not.
Most of the time that we leave her with someone and go off on our own, we're usually back before the next feed is due - or just in time for the next feed. It just cancels out the need to bottle feed. Mummy's there and her boobs are filled with milk, after all. Why bother?
And honestly, with a baby that is nearly a year old and slowly getting the hang of eating solids, whether or not she drinks milk while I'm away ought to cease being a pressing issue any longer. And because she is still taking two naps a day, she can easily just sleep partway of our time apart, further negating the need for a milk-feed.
There is an underlying issue, of course. The two best candidates for babysitting are the two grandmothers, and admittedly, it would make things easier for them if Baby K drank milk from a bottle like a formula-fed baby, or a breast milk-drinking baby whose mum needs to work. But the truth is she's neither of those, and trying to squeeze her square peg into their round hole is really making this a pain in both of our behinds. And you can't say I haven't tried. Yes it wasn't my best shot - I could've tried every single damn day, but I didn't, sure - but I daresay I tried.
Surely, there's a way to make all parties happ(ier), than to render the two most central persons in this equation miserable, bottle-wise?
