More on the Great Bottle Battle

So I've mentioned our bottle issues on several occasions, but I haven't been all that specific and I've been getting a lot of "have you tried this?" and "what about that?" kinds of questions. I think it's high time for a more detailed post on the topic, don't you? Well, you don't have to agree with me... I'm writing one anyway ;-)

What exactly do I mean by "battle"? I mean all-out war. This kid is serious about his demand to exclusively nurse. As soon as we put it up to his lips he tightens them up and starts shaking his head back and forth to evade it. Every now and then we manage to wiggle it into his mouth, to which he responds with incessant and forceful tongue thrusting. He never even comes close to latching, much less sucking. We try to be gentle with it and give him frequent breaks to calm down so as to avoid getting him all fired up, but the next inevitable step is always crying and flailing. It progresses rather rapidly from crying to full-blown screaming, at which point we'll usually take a 5 or 10 minute break, calm him down and try again. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. This has gone on for as long as two hours without success (by which point he hadn't eaten in 4 hours and should've been pretty darn hungry, as he has been nursing at least every two hours). That is what I mean by "battle".

We've tried just about everything we can think of, and we're nearing the point of taking the "he'll take it when he gets hungry enough" stance and just waiting him out. You can imagine how excited I am about that. Talk about going against every mothering instinct you have... try starving out your own baby. I just don't know what else to do. We've tried offering it between meal times when he's not hungry, we've tried when he's hungry, I've tried, Ben has tried (when I'm in the room, when I'm in another room, when I'm out of the house entirely), we've tried various times of day, we've tried a more breast-like nipple (the Tommee Tippee), we've tried playing games with the nipple for a few days (we even got him sucking on it happily!), we've tried taking a break for several days and then trying again, we've tried frozen breast milk, we've tried fresh-from-the-tap breast milk, we've tried waiting him out for as long as four hours... I'm telling you, this kid is adamant. I even tried pulling the ol' switcheroo on him when he was groggy and finishing up nursing before bed (but still actively sucking and swallowing), and the little stinker just pulled back as soon as he felt it touch his lips, eyes still closed, and clenched his lips and stuck his lower lip out. He just laid there - lower lip sticking out, eyes closed - until I offered my breast again, which he happily latched onto and continued to nurse for another couple of minutes. At that point, I just had to laugh at him. He knows what's up, and his resolve appears to remain unshaken despite our best efforts.

Any other ideas? I'm willing to try just about anything at this point! There's another bottle I've considered (Breast Flow), the mechanism of which more closely approximates the action and flow of nursing, but I really don't think it's a flow issue. He doesn't even know what kind of flow or release mechanism his bottle has, because he has never sucked milk from it! A little bit of milk always leaks out into his mouth during the struggle, so I know that he knows what's in there, but he has never removed milk from the nipple willingly. I think the core issue is that he'd just really rather nurse, and he is proving to be quite strong-willed.

"Try me, Sucka."

HELP!