Off the Bottle!

Okay so I wrote this post January 2oth…but couldn’t post it…then I forgot I wrote it…blah, blah, blah…

Oh yeah! Yaya is no longer taking a bottle! AT. ALL. Part of the “gifting of the extra time” before palate surgery, I believed, was to teach Yaya how to drink from a cup and to try to reduce or totally eliminate the bottle. Why do this you ask? Well first, the post-op recovery for palate surgery is horrible and many children refuse a bottle because having the nipple even touch the top of their mouth is too painful. While Yaya’s nipples are cut to pour out the liquid out with no sucking, she still uses the top of her mouth to manipulate the nipple and to help pinch it off when she is resting from guzzling it down. If I could remove the need for a bottle all together it would just make it easier for her to take liquids after surgery. Second, she is rapidly approaching her 3rd birthday and has no idea how to drink from a cup! Kids with unrepaired cleft can totally drink from cups, someone just needed to TEACH HER HOW! Third, there is the whole issue of her primary nutrition coming from a bottle and she is almost 3 years old thing. And last, I can’t lie…I’M. SO. SICK. OF. CLEANING. BOTTLES.

I started this process by contacting the IAC to see what I “should” be doing for her nutritionally. They told me to eliminate the noon bottle for one week, and then drop the morning bottle to 4 oz. All the while increasing the baby food if possible. Check. Did that no problem. While in that first week of dropping the noon bottle I had the idea to “have tea", everyday with the girls. I got out their teapots, cups and saucers. Eden and I began to teach Yaya how to pour water from her teapot into her tea cup and then drink out of it. The first day was a pretty wet day. But by day three she was doing pretty well. On day four instead of her night bottle I fed her rice milk out of a cup. She did most of the drinking without any help. She was a little messy but did really well. I did the same for her morning bottle the next day. This happened last Friday night and she hasn’t looked back. Now she can pretty much drink from a cup without dribbling anything. Her only real spills happens when she is distracted and not paying attention. She doesn’t exactly grasp the concept that if she moves wrong or tips her hand then milk goes everywhere. But that I think is totally age related. Eden just now gets that she needs to be careful with open cups. I am so stinkin’ proud of Yaya! I am freaked out at how quickly she learned how to do this! By Feb. 25th she will be a pro! I’m hoping that enough time will have passed that the bottle won’t even enter her mind as something she would want. Her and I still have our quiet time while she drinks her morning an evening milk so that is still preserved and still very much needed.

Thus also ends buying toddler formula! The down side to this is that she has really amped up her eating of baby food. And I mean really. She went from about 3 containers of baby food a day to now 8 containers, plus some sort of apple sauce, pudding or yogurt cup. She is an eating machine now!  She had 4 containers for lunch today!!!

On a totally separate note…how cute does she look in her silks?!

P.S. If you have ever heard Eric or I utter the phrase “angry Asian” before, we mean this:

This was her, “If you don’t stop taking my picture, I’m going to go nuclear,” look.