bottles/nipples for 36 weekers

Hi ladies,

I am finding the need to be overly prepared. For those of you who brought babies home before they were able to nurse for each feeding, what bottles did you find that were easiest for them. We have the Avent drop-ins, but they seem awfully large. The hospital may give us the one time use nipples, but I still want to be prepared.

Thanks!

Nicole

 

My 35 weekers did great with Avent nipples, they also didn't have any trouble at the breast. We did "toppers" for them because nursing would really tire them out.

 

If they do well with the one time use nipples you can buy some from Enfamil (they ship right to your house) and you can wash and reuse them...
http://store.enfamil.com/nipples.html

 

Toppers- what we called the bonus milk that we bottle fed them.
I would express milk before feeds and after feeds and we would use that in the
small volufeed containers ( the little bottles) or in our Avent bottles.

 

The only nipple that Maya can take is the Playtex nipples. My LC said that they did research, and playtex nipples are the slowest flow- slower than avent or anything. Maya cannot have anything faster because she will spit up. This nipple makes her work, which is important if you are going to breastfeed (I can't BF anymore, but she still needs these nipples).

 

They used enfamil bottles at the hospital. They had some small ones. But we ended up switching to playtex ventair bottles. They are pretty small as well.

 

My twins weren't preemies, but the avent nipples ran way too fast for them. That's a somewhat common problem judging from the reviews I've read. We ended up using gerber nuk nipples, they seemed to run even slower than playtex nipples. It might be a good idea to have a few different ones on hand just in case. We went through several before I found one that was slow enough for us.

Gerber nuk nipples fit on avent bottles, so if you wanted to try them you wouldn't have to go and buy a whole new set of bottles.

I put my nuk nipples in gerber's gentle flow bottles though, I tossed all of my avent and nuk bottles because of BPA.

 

My girls were born at 34 weeks and we brought them home at 36 weeks. We used the bottles from the hospital for about a month after they came home (I pumped and did formula). The wonderful NICU nurses hooked us up before discharge and told us how to wash them to reuse. After that we moved to Playtex drop ins for M and the old-school Gerber 'clearview' bottles for A (after trying about a million for A!).

 

Ours were 35 weekers and we use Dr. Browns. They work great for us and the twins have already moved up to the level two nipples.