Baby bottles

When my daughter was born, she was amazingly colicky. I was absolutely miserable for the first three months of her life. She refused to nurse and took to feeding out of baby bottles from one week old. I was disappointed about that for a while, but I had to just go with the flow. Since the moment we brought her home, she's never slept for an entire night. Her colic kept her from sleeping soundly for more than 2 hours at a time. As she grew, that didn't change too much. On her first birthday, her pediatrician told me that she needs to be weaned off of the baby bottles. Of course, she wasn't getting baby bottles all the time, just at night. It seemed to be the only way she'd sleep. If she didn't have a bottle when she laid down, forget it - she wasn't interested in falling asleep.

So, I began the mission of trying to get rid of the baby bottles. My husband worked crazy hours and was always grumpy. He was perfectly miserable when he didn't get any sleep so allowing her to have a bottle at night was a solution that was acceptable to him. He wasn't thrilled when I said that we needed to get the baby bottles out of the picture. For a few nights, I tried, I really did. She screamed for hours. And I do mean, screamed. She made herself so sick that she threw up. I always gave in, tears rolling down my own face, and handed her a bottle. She'd immediately fall asleep. I know it was the wrong thing to do, but it solved the issue temporarily. At the time, I was more interested in having a happy husband that getting my daughter to give up the baby bottles. Lots of people told me that there wasn't anything wrong with a one year old having a bottle at night. Then, there were the people who said that there were lots of things that could go wrong with it. I was torn.

Unfortunately, this continued until her second birthday. She would actually go into the cupboard and look through the baby bottles that still lived in our household and find the one that she wanted to take to bed. I had finally gotten her to allow me to just put water in the bottle, which didn't thrill her, but she had grown to accept. The pediatrician told me that I really needed to put an end to it. By this point, I figured it would be a terrible battle. One by one, the baby bottles started disappearing. Each night, I'd throw one out after she was asleep and told her that the "bottle fairy" was taking them to give to new babies. She seemed to accept this for some reason. Finally, only one of the baby bottles was left. To my amazement, she came to me one night before bed and handed me the bottle. She said that she wanted to give it to another baby and she didn't need it anymore. She proceeded to climb into her bed and fall asleep. If I had only invented the bottle fairy a few years earlier...