Bottle Drama

Last Thursday, Darbi stopped taking a bottle. I mean completely stopped. When she decided she was done with the bottle, it was with frozen milk. So we thought that maybe our frozen milk supply had gone bad.. So Friday, when it was bottle time again, I pumped some fresh milk and tried that through the bottle. Rejected. Then we tried just straight formula in water (which we've never tried before), denied!!! The only constant was the bottle and we were out of ideas. Meanwhile, she's starving and I had pumped all my leftover milk thinking it would work in the bottle! I was dry and she was screaming!!! She ended up falling asleep which was good because I could fill my milk supply up. When I would go to work, I would have to stop mid-project, go home and feed her every time she was hungry. It was hard to get into a good rhythm.

I was out of ideas and so Saturday night I called the NICU and asked for our OT because she knew Darbi really well. She wasn't in but returned my phone call Monday night. She said that this was super common in preemies but she usually saw it happen around 3 1/2 months adjusted. We're around 5 1/2 months adjusted now. She said to try mixing 4 ml of banana baby food with 2 oz of frozen mother's milk to make it similar to a banana smoothie. Tuesday marks the first day of my life where I have ever had to buy real baby food! Surprisingly, kinda weird.. anyway. We tried it Tuesday night.. she HATED it. But our OT said it might take 4-5 times before she warms up to the taste. So yesterday we went and bought a new bottle. We tried it today, along with the banana frozen milk smoothie and it worked!!! We're back to bottles again. We'll try her without the banana goodness tomorrow to see if it was the taste of the milk or the other bottle that made her mad. After we'll try fortifying and hopefully we can get this girl gaining weight again!! She has slowed her weight gain down a bit and if I let her go too long without those extra calories.. we may be in trouble.

I have to say though... I LOVE our new bottle!! It's a bit of a pain to clean and if we were doing bottles for every feeding.. I'd probably lose my mind with cleaning bottles but this one is AMAZING and I wish we had it from the second we brought her home! It is a Dr. Brown's Bottle and it has a special positive pressure vent that releases air so it feels just like she's breast feeding and makes her less gassy! So crisis averted! I won't be breastfeeding her forever!!