Bottle feeding breast milk for NICU infant

[sonyak]

Hi, everyone!

Our baby is 10 days old - she was born 2 lbs, 10 oz, as she was premature. She will be in the NICU for about a month, simply to grow!

I am pumping breast milk, which she is getting both through a bottle and via NG tube. My breasts are too large just yet to breast feed her, although I am going to try non-nutritive feeding later this week with a breast shield. My ultimate goal is to breast feed her completely, but at this point, as long as she is getting my breast milk, I am satisfied.

However, I have a bottle question for all of you....are there any particular bottle nipples and bottles that work very well with premature infants? I ask this as our NICU uses some sort of Enfamil bottle nipple and bottle that appears HUGE.

Also, what about pacifiers for premature infants?

Any and all suggestions/advice greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Sonya

[sehbub]

Our NICU used the little (maybe 2oz?) bottles with the yellow nipples (I honestly have no idea of the brand). Having a large nipple is not necessarily a bad thing. It's not like your nipples/breasts will shrink, kwim?

As for a pacifier, the Soothie that they provided in the NICU worked really well for DD3 (she was a 30wkr).

Good luck! The NICU journey can be a rough one. Hang in there.

[Siera]

We, too, used the Soothie pacifiers. For bottles, dd preferred Born Free. I had the nurses switch to those once I realized dd liked them so much.

[liberal_chick]

The bottles they used standard when my ds was in the NICU POURED milk. If you turned them upside down, it was just pretty much a steady stream (I tested it). I knew that I wanted to nurse ds as well as use expressed milk in a bottle (ie-I needed him to be used to working for his milk, not just swallowing what poured into his mouth), so I brought in the bottle of my choice (Avent with a slow flow nipple) and they used that.