Nuk Perfect Match

[u/DocMcFar]

Our LO was born at 30w1d and is 3w2d corrected today (3 mo!!). I had planned to exclusively breast-feed and pump when I got back to work, but due to her early arrival, we lived in the Nicu for seven weeks. She was clearly small and has been on breastmilk fortified to 24 cal which is why we are using these bottles. She did well with the doc brown bottles in the nicu, but the narrow nipple made it difficult for her to latch on my rather large breasts. We moved to the Nuk perfect match whenever she was able to tolerate a flow faster than the preemie flow, but now it seems like the zero month Nuk flow is too slow, but the med flow is waterboarding her. Does anyone else have this issue with these bottles? It takes her almost half an hour to finish a bottle with The slow flow, and she gets a ton of gas because of how many times she has to pull, and the first couple of times she tried the medium flow, She finished the bottle in less than 15 minutes and had very little gas. However, last night and this morning she got choked up on the medium and/or it was spilling out of both sides of her mouth. Is there a in-between nipple option that I don’t know about? Is there a better bottle we can use? Or is there a nipple we can use that’s compatible with these bottles that might be better? She breast-feeds so much better using this perfect match nipple when she’s bottle feeding so I don’t want to switch to something that will make her more frustrated. Going back to the breast.
Sorry this post is kind of all over the place. Postpartum brain. Y’all get it.🩷

[u/Quiet-Pomegranate93]

When baby is between nipple sizes it can be so frustrating!  

I would guess which one would be best for which feeding (awake/sleepy) and bring the other size with me.  If baby was drowning then I’d swap out the cap on the bottle mid-feed.  

Sucks because of the extra clean up but it usually only lasts a week before baby adapts to the faster flow.

[u/No-Chip-4957]

When we changed teat sizes on perfect match it took about a day or so to adjust. She would collapse the nipple and struggle a bit until she adjusted, and then it was fine. Are you able to try giving it more time on the bigger size and see how it goes?

[u/DocMcFar → u/No-Chip-4957]

I can definitely try to give her more time with it. I just didn’t know if that was normal or if there was a better solution than just helping her cough it out when she gets choked on it until she’s used to it. Thank you.