A stay-at-home-dad offers thoughts on the joys and sorrows, and everything in between, of fatherhood.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Bottle-feeding blues

Alright, cranking up the blog after a long hiatus. I had determined, once Annalee reached a certain age, that I was arguably compromising her right to an anonymous life when I wrote about her here. That might have been a good decision, or I might have been over-thinking. Probably somewhere in between.

What's new, you ask? Baby number two is the glorious, transcendent Rell, whom we welcomed to our family two months ago and change. I'm having to start her on a bottle a little earlier than I did Annalee, as my lovely wife has less time off from work than she did in the Ocean State.

How's the bottle-feeding going, you ask? Not so well. Or, let me put it another way: Probably the greatest challenge of my life so far. My beautiful, sweet, brown-eyed baby doesn't want the bottle when she's hungry, and she doesn't want to try it when she's not, and she doesn't want to try it when she's in-between. She doesn't want it. She expresses this by turning her head, pushing her legs off whatever's near to move herself away from the bottle, batting the bottle hard with her right hand, crying to the point of screaming, etc.

Additionally, she can't really be put down. So, what I have is a baby that most would describe as "colicky." For reasons that I can easily understand, my wife doesn't really love that word, and doesn't think it applies in this case. What I believe is that she has, through a combination of insight, willpower, and a physical endowment that I lack, been able to see our girl through some real hardship.

Labels and diagnoses aside, I need help. I need help slowly and methodically inducing Relly Belly to take a bottle. The sense that I am water-boarding my beloved baby is KILLING me. So, I need tips. Not ideas, not theories -- tips. Thanks in advance.