I feel like DH and I are the last ones to try to do this, but the bottle drinking can't go on. The poor girl won't have teeth. Right now she has warm milk before bed, when she first gets up in the morning and before her nap. We are struggling to get her to drink it out of a sippy cup. Thoughts? Happy for advice.
We still do a bottle before nap and bed. If you're looking to stop using bottles, I agree that I'd start with the morning bottle. Once I stopped nursing, we never replaced her morning milk and she did fine.
Thankfully I found the NUK sippy that he'd take and drink out of decent. We tried cold turkey but he spotted a bottle and wanted it. The next day I had all bottles up and he didn't even ask for it. Just drank from sippy. Thank God! I was dreading it.
I was just talking to DH about this at dinner. I was like, "It's not going to be easy whenever we take the bottle away, but we need to do it. Can we just agree on an age and then make him quit cold turkey?"
DH said, "7?" Geez, I feel like I'm going to have to so this by myself. I should just hide all the bottles in the attic so that DS and DH will be forced to quit delaying it.
We still do morning and bedtime bottle. I'm going to drop the morning one soon. And then the bedtime one closer to 18 months. I don't think it'll be too hard. Probably harder for me than him. I love the snuggle time
We dropped the morning first. I thought it would be a fight but he didn't even miss it. However, the night bottle will be another story. I think we are going to transition to the sippy while I'm on vacation in a week and a half. We are still going to heat the milk a but at first and I'm going to let him drink it in rocking chair like the bottle now. Gradually I will move that time up and he will drink it downstairs before I bring him up to bed.
At this age, I say drop them all at once. Dropping them one at a time is going to be confusing for LO. Just get all the bottles out of sight, drop the milk-sleep connection, and don't go back.
We give a cup of milk with dinner and then she plays for 15 minutes then does her bedtime routine (including brushing teeth). She didn't miss her bottles. Getting her to drink milk from a cup was trickier.
At this age, your LO doesn't need milk for nutrition as long as she is eating a balanced diet, so just continue to offer milk in a cup at meals, but don't sweat it if she doesn't drink it-- she'll be getting plenty of nutrition from her food. It took my LO 3 weeks before she'd drink a full cup of milk. I just kept offering, and she eventually increased from 1-2 oz to 5 oz in a serving.
Re: breaking the bottle
DH said, "7?" Geez, I feel like I'm going to have to so this by myself. I should just hide all the bottles in the attic so that DS and DH will be forced to quit delaying it.