Two nifty things, one I discovered, one from a resourceful father:

When giving an emergency bottle to my friend's exclusively breastfed
3-mo-old:  she did NOT want that bottle!  I circled the 'neck' of the bottle
with my thumb and forefinger, and put my next three fingers onto the baby's
cheek;  at first I tried patting (the generalized "jiggling" response you
have to a fussy baby) but what worked best was just gentle pressure of my
hand on her cheek.  I realized afterward that I was simulating the
skin-to-skin contact of BFing.  It worked!  (This probably wouldn't work if
you have small hands, but most any dad could probably do it with practice.)

I had another friend with a prodigious milk supply and a fast-growing baby
who was taking 8-10 ounces of EBM by the time he was four months old.  His
dad noticed that he balked, squirming and fussing, after about 4 ounces,
puzzled over it, and then *aha* - switched sides!  Baby polished off the
rest of the bottle without any trouble.

BTW someone asked awhile back about "record-setting" milk expressions.  This
friend and I worked PP together and took pump breaks together;  this was
back in 1980 when full-size electric pumps weren't even much available for
NICU moms much less "ordinary" working moms!  She used (ugh) an Evenflo
bicycle-horn style pump and I did manual expression and each of us had no
trouble expressing eight ounces.  My "personal best" was 11 ounces.  (Winner
and still champeen! :D)  Using coffee cups it is possible to hand-express on
both sides at once;  you thread your middle finger through the handle and
press the breast onto the rim of the cup.  Don't knock it til you've tried
it!  It worked great!

Mary Renard
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