Milk and Bottle vs. Sippy Cup

While I haven't written about bedtime bottle vs. sippy cup conundrum in a very long time, the issue hasn't really gone away. I still neurotic and anxious that because Ivan goes to bed with a bottle and doesn't let us really brush his teeth, that his teeth will be black, rotten and falling out by the ripe old age of four.

However, I've made some incremental progresss in the last two weeks.

Ivan still goes to bed with his born free bottle. But lately (maybe even the last few months) he increasingly finishes drinking "meme" while I'm drying him off and attempting to put "jammas" and diapers on him (there is a lot post-bath going to to bed resistance constisting of jumping on the bed and sheer refusal to allow me to dress him). Once it's time to go to bed, he sometimes asks for more meme, sometimes he doesn't.

(He's also been doing a lot of bed hopping lately, sometimes wanting to fall a sleep in his crib, "drugi krevet" meaning the spare bedroom, or our bed. I haven't been able to decipher whether there is a pattern to his bed preference.)

The incremental progress of the last few months consist of:

1. Getting him to drink from the hard-plastic born-free sippy cup nipple, after some serious refusal and crying. The soft kind used to be preferable because he'd have to suck the milk out and it was softer to chew on.

2. Not promply replacing the hard-plastic nipple once the hole gets too big and too much milk starts flowing. He used to complain but not anymore. So now, he really just drinks from it and uses the nipple to chew on.

3. Getting him to finish the milk before he actually is put to bed. Sometime he asks for more milk, sometimes he doesn't. This still doesn't fix the problem of brushing his teeth after milk and before bed time, but we're getting closer. (We brush his teeth before he gets into the bathtub. And in the two weeks or so, he actually willingly opens his mouth and lets us brush the teeth. It didn't used to be so; he'd insist of brushing his own teeth, which really meant sucking the toothpaste of the brush and then wanting to put more paste on the toothbrush. All by himself of course.

4. Last week, while we were at Whole Foods buying milk and kupit yogurt, I bought a small tetrapack of milk. The kind that looks like juice and comes with a straw. I know he likes to drink from a straw, and he likes those juice boxes, when he sees them at birthday parties. The boxed milk was my experiment. Would he drink milk out of something other than his born free bottle? When I tried this experiment in the past, he'd throw a fit, as he did two weeks ago when I tried giving him milk from another bottle that had a big sippy cup spout.

But this time at Whole Foods, he grabbed the box, "ma box," and attempted to put the straw in. I helped. As he took his first sip, I crossed my fingers. Would he be shocked to taste milk instead of juice and reject it? Nope, he drank the milk. As he repeatedly told the cashier from his perch on the cart, "ma milk, ma milk."

5. Yesterday, we went to Babies'R Us. I was on a mission to find another sippy cup contraption from which he could drink milk and water without the liquid getting spilled everywhere. Spilled milk--all over his clothes and his sheets--has been the unfortunate side effect of not replacing the hard born free nipples. Since the nipples now basically have a huge hole in them, the milk just spills out, especially when Ivan drinks from it laying down or tilts his head back and the cup all the way up to drink it. (Stale and sour milk smell smells really rancid, as poor Medic knows.)

For water, I settled on the stainless steel born free water bottle. It had the best spill-proof lid when not in use and since it's made of steel not plastic, it won't get dingy or stinky.

For milk, I couldn't find what I had envisioned, which was frustrating. All these bottle and sippy cup companies proclaim their complicated and spill-proof designs and technology to be superior to one another. But I found fault with most of them. They either have some commercial characters, ala Dora, Thomas, etc on them. Why do they have to be all girly and pink or macho and blue? They don't have a lid, which is a problem for his lunch box. They're a bottle nipple, while I'm after a sippy cup. They use a flippable straw, which I think is hard to clean (and Ivan will gnaw on it, destroying it in a second.)

I realize I'm spoiled and petty with all these options in front of them. They are options. (Most are ridiculous and unnecessary but still, they're options.) I wonder what moms in poor countries use. I wonder what did my mom use to teach to me drink. I'm sure that despite our latest and greatest Chicco imports, the bottle and sippy cup selection in communist Yugoslavia 36 years ago was quite inferior to the Babies'R Us wall options available to me now.

While I was pondering this wall of options, Ivan insisted of getting something. Finally, I picked up the "right" sippy cup he was pointing at. A munchin two bottle package with straws. Since he wanted it so badly, I bought it. Heh, it didn't seem like a bad choice after all.

Today, he drank milk from it. Except the milk spills out when he lays down or tilts the bottle. Also, he can't get all the milk out of the bottle because the straw doesn't pick it up. So today, I had to keep unscrewing the bottle so he can drink the milk from the cup itself.

I finally put milk in one of those cheap First Years disposable sippy cups with hard, non-chew sippy cup lids. It was worth a try, since he's been so open to drinking milk from a variety of cups in the last few days. He drank from it as well. And oddly enough, the milk didn't spill when he tilted the bottle.

Maybe that was the answer after all. The cheap non-engineered First Years sippy cups. I didn't have a chance to put it to the bedtime test.

Since we were late putting him to bed, Ivan actually couldn't wait for me to put him in his crib. I could barely dry him off and put diapers on him, he was soooo tired. He didn't even wait for "meme."