Switching to WCM - When did you and how?

stepgirl21 · June 2011

Excited to not have to buy formula to too much longer but am worried about the transition to WCM. Beau only drinks his formula now if it is really warm. Not sure if I should warm the milk or just make him go "cold" turkey. Did you mix milk with formula for a few days until baby got use to the taste? Did you wait until baby was officially 12 months before starting the transition?

qtpa2t · June 2011

We just gave it to her in a sippy cup, and she drank it right up. We started just shy of 12 months. She was still nursing though, so it wasn't entirely cold turkey.

mrsolsenk12 · June 2011

I never mixed formula and WCM. I also never gave WCM in a bottle. I looked at it that formula was for bottles, sippy/straw cups are for WCM. My DS always drank his formula cold or room temp so cold milk was never a problem for us but I know a lot of people will slightly warm WCM at first to adjust them to drinking it cold.

We did a gradual transition. Starting at 11 months I started offering a little bit of it to get him used to the taste. Around 11 1/2 months, I started dropping 1 bottle of formula and replacing it with a milk sippy. We were totally off formula nd bottles by his 1 year old well visit (1 week after his 1st b-day)

OrangeSmoke · June 2011

Hey - still have that coupon for EBs formula... you still need it? One last can of formula?

superned · June 2011

I have been EBF, so I didn't do any mixing because I was terrified that if she hated the WCM that I would end up wasting BM. I just gave her cold WCM in a sippy with meals starting just after 11 months. She wasn't into it for the first week or so, but now she drinks it right up. She definitely wasn't crazy about it being cold, but she got over it.

We did a very slow transition starting at 11 months. I wanted to stop pumping at 12 months, so the goal was for her to drink only WCM at child care and nurse when she was with me. I got the okay from our pedi to do it that way, and it has worked so far. I'm done pumping, but still have a freezer stash, so this week is her last week of bottles and BM...we'll see how that goes!

laura1 · June 2011

At 11 months, I dropped the 11am bottle and started giving them milk in a sippy with lunch. Neither of them took the milk.

So I kept doing that, but then mixed the formula with WCM for their other bottles. One week I would do 4oz formula with 2oz milk for the other 3 bottles. The next week I did 2oz formula with 4oz milk. The following week, I just gave milk in a sippy to replace the bottles.

DS did well with this transition (once I found a sippy he would drink it out of, and I had to hold the sippy with him on my lap, just like a bottle). DD did not. We finally just went cold turkey with her, and after 2 days of very little to drink, she finally started drinking milk. At most now, she will take 8-10oz. But she loves water and will eat cheese and yogurt!

Good luck!

ETA: My DD would also only drink warm bottles - I think the mixing milk with formula helped her get used to colder temps, but I also think that is partly why she doesn't drink much milk. I have no desire to warm her milk all of the time though, so I am just offering her the cold milk and hoping she will start drinking it!

ladychicago · June 2011

We are struggling with this right now. I was sure we could be one of those "we never put milk in a bottle, went straight to sippies and it was great!" stories. Yeah, not so much. Milk in a sippy is our enemy at the moment. I made the switch after our 12 month pedi visit so i could talk to them about it first. I never mixed milk and formula, just put milk in her bottles (after attempting it in a sippy and failing at that for a few days). And I had gradually stopped warming up her formula, so that wasn't an issue by 12 months.

now that she takes a good amount of milk by bottles (implying she likes it and is used to it) we are tackling the sippy transition. So far, it isn't going well. Hopefully she figures it out soon! In the meantime, I am pushing yogurt and cheese as much as I can.

pinkcallalily · June 2011

We started right at 12 months because he had to be on wcm when he switched to a new room at daycare (he stayed home for a week because we had family in town and we used that week to switch). We basically just treated wcm as a new drink, but didn't take away the old one. He always hated bottles and only took them at daycare so those were easy to get rid of. He still got to nurse whenever he wanted, but I would offer a sippy of wcm at meals and snacks. He struggled a little when he went back to daycare, but it didn't take long for him to ge the hang of it. His problem wasn't that he wanted a bottle, it was that he wanted water in his sippy instead of milk.

Ali212 · June 2011

Our transition to WCM with our older daughter went pretty smoothly. We had no issues with acceptance. We started around 12 months - almost on the nose...we did it right after her 12 month check up. We did phase it - we did a week at 75% formula/25% WCM, a week at 50/50 and a week at 25% formula/75% WCM before finally going to 100% WCM but there were no issues at any step of the phases.

We gave it to her in a sippy ONLY. She had been getting her formula in a bottle and water in a sippy before then. She had no problems with sippy acceptance. We only gave her WCM in a sippy cup. No issues there.

On the cold vs. warm question - I could still kill my husband for this! He insisted on heating her milk....he always said "I wouldn't want to drink cold milk on such a cold day" and would warm it. We've created a monster! She never asked for it warm at that age but now, we can't give her milk unless it's warm. She's three+ years old. I think we (he) created this mess.

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