Pediatricians recommend that you wean your baby off the bottle by age 12 months. With Cal, I postponed it to 15 and of course, as a first-time mom, I was paranoid about it and felt a little guilty. This time around, which seems like much more than just two years later, I let my little girl hang onto her bottle until 18 months with no regrets. It was just so convenient and she loved it so much...why be in a rush to give up something so good? In fact, part of me still wonders, "What's wrong with letting her have a bottle until age two? Can't we just push it back to age two? I think I know a couple of two-year-olds who carry a bottle around, right?" However, my conscience got the better of me and after several weeks of half-heartedly talking to her about "throwing her bottles away," a ceremonial ritual that seemed to work well with Cal, I decided on Monday to go ahead and do it. And I've got to tell you something...it ain't going so well.
I guess I was thinking she was good enough on a sippee cup that it would be a pretty smooth transition. Wrong. I was forgetting how much of drinking a bottle is a comfort to an 18-month-old. While the first day of sippees may have seemed like a novelty to her, she has since realized that she's supposed to get ALL of her milk from a sippee cup from now on and is pretty sad about it, especially at nap time and bed time. Thankfully she likes to drink water out of an open cup sometimes. I say thankfully since my primary worry about her during this has been dehydration. In fact, this morning at breakfast I was sitting across the table from her. She had an open up of water on one side of her and the new sippee I'd bought her on the other side, full of milk. In a telling moment, I watched her look from one to the other two or three times. Then she reached for the water. Maybe this means we'll skip the sippee stage altogether!
