Cha..cha…cha…changes! Transitioning from a Bottle to a Sippy Cup.

When you’re pregnant or childless and people tell you not to compare your kiddo to other kiddos you think to yourself…of course not.  When you’re a mommy and your friends are mommies “Is your kiddo doing this…” are words often muttered.  It’s nearly impossible to NOT compare.

When Caroline and Lincoln were approaching the 9 month mark, neither were crawling and both were in completely different places when it came to their eating habits.  I guess we would assume that they would be totally different in the transition from bottle to sippy department, too.

Vanessa was an avid “What To Expect Your First Year” reader and with the exception of letting her kiddo sleep in mommy and daddy’s bed come 4am, she followed it to a T.  When we got to the age where we needed to ween C off the bottle and onto the sippy, introducing the sippy was NO issue.  She loved her sippy for juice, water and all things that weren’t milk.  For some reason she KNOWS what milk looks like in her sippy and refused.  We figured we had a few more months to work on getting her to drink milk from a sippy so we didn’t fret.  A few weeks before the big first birthday, we started to offer her milk in a sippy at night before bed.  100% refusal and a 100% bratty bedtime girl…we caved and started giving her a bottle at night.  Caroline goes to The Goddard School and they were AWESOME about integrating the sippy cup into her daily routine and little by little she started drinking milk from a sippy during the day.It’s still a struggle for us to get her to drink from a sippy at night and figure if drinking milk from a bottle helps our little lady fall asleep, we’ll do it.  We know thousands of parents probably disagree but our mentality is she won’t walk into 1st grade with a bottle…so…no harm, no foul.

Allison and Lincoln on the other hand had a much smoother transition.

I actually had no idea what the appropriate age was to transition Lincoln from a bottle to a sippy cup… in fact I didn’t think there was anything special you had to do. I just assumed they did it on their own. Wooops! It wasn’t until Vanessa and I were talking on the phone one day about bottles and sippy cups that I realized I was supposed to be transitioning him soon. Thanks, Vanessa for keeping me up to speed with my child’s milestones!

Lincoln was about 11 months old when I realized in a month he was supposed to be off a bottle. I already had hand me down sippy cups from my sister so it was easy to give it a whirl. I used formula, put it in the cup, and we laid on the ground. Lincoln never was a bottle holding kind of baby, but we laid there on the ground while he fumbled with the odd shaped nipple and I held his little hands on the handles. He wasn’t that great at it and he fussed beyond belief, but I continued to force him to hold it (please don’t call CPS on me). Within about 30 minutes he was holding his own cup! Yea, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y! By 11 1/2 months, I packed up all of our bottles and we were 100% on sippy cups. That’s it… that’s our story, LOL! It was truly that easy for us…although he still hasn’t figured out how to tip his cup up to get the milk to come out so he still sits back in a reclined position. Around the same time that we packed up bottles we also introduced milk. We started with almond milk, goat milk, and transitional formula but by 13 months we were completely on whole milk and no more formula, but he refuses juice and water. My kid may not walk or talk like Caroline, but he’s bottle and formula free.

Moral of the story, there is no right or wrong way to transition your baby from a bottle to a sippy cup and every child truly is different!

Pass the bottle, please.