Nobody tells you how complicated feeding a newborn can be. Or rather, people do tell you — but you don't really understand it until you're sitting on the edge of your bed at 3am, your baby is screaming, and nothing you're doing seems to be working.
That was me, three weeks after my daughter Orla was born. I was combination feeding — breastfeeding when I could, expressing when I couldn't, and using a bottle for the rest. In theory, a sensible plan. In practice, a daily battle with nipple confusion that left both of us exhausted and frustrated.
The bottle we'd been using was fine. Perfectly adequate. But Orla had started refusing the breast after bottle feeds, and I was beginning to dread every feeding session. Something had to change.
The Problem I Was Trying to Solve
After a lot of late-night research (the kind you do with one hand while feeding, phone screen dimmed to its lowest setting), I landed on the same conclusion repeatedly: the teat matters enormously. Specifically, the flow rate and the way the teat behaves in the baby's mouth.
Many standard bottle teats allow milk to flow freely with very little effort from the baby. That's convenient, but it means the baby learns that bottles are easy and breasts require work — and starts to prefer the path of least resistance. The result is exactly what I was experiencing.
What I needed was a bottle with a slow-flow teat that actually required the baby to work for the milk — mimicking the effort and rhythm of breastfeeding closely enough that switching between the two didn't cause confusion.
Why I Chose the Lansinoh Glass Bottle
I'd narrowed it down to a few options when I came across the Lansinoh Glass Bottle 160ml. A few things made it stand out:
- The NaturalWave teat — Lansinoh's own slow-flow teat is specifically designed to mimic the baby's natural sucking motion and let them control the milk flow themselves. That was exactly what I was looking for.
- Glass construction — I'd been vaguely uneasy about plastic bottles for a while. Borosilicate glass is BPA and BPS free, doesn't absorb odours or stains, and doesn't degrade over time the way plastic can. It felt like the cleaner, more durable choice.
- Compatibility with my breast pump — I use a Lansinoh pump, and the bottle connects directly to it. No decanting, no extra washing up, no faff.
- The 160ml size — at three weeks old, Orla wasn't taking huge volumes per feed. The 160ml bottle was the right size for where we were, without the waste of filling a larger bottle she'd never finish.
The First Week
I'll be honest: I didn't expect an immediate transformation. I'd read enough parenting forums to know that feeding issues rarely resolve overnight.
But the difference was noticeable from the first feed. Orla took to the NaturalWave teat without any fuss — no gagging, no pulling away, no frustrated crying. She fed at a pace that looked, for the first time, like the pace she fed at the breast. Calm, rhythmic, controlled.
By the end of the first week, she was moving between breast and bottle without the resistance I'd been battling. I don't want to overstate it — combination feeding is still demanding, and there were still difficult feeds. But the specific problem I'd been trying to solve — the nipple confusion, the breast refusal after bottles — had largely resolved.
Two Months On: What I've Noticed
We're now two months in and the Lansinoh glass bottle has become a fixture of our feeding routine. A few things I've noticed over time:
- It cleans beautifully. Glass doesn't hold onto smells the way plastic does. After two months of daily use, the bottle looks and smells exactly as it did when new. I run it through the dishwasher and it comes out spotless.
- It's more robust than I expected. I was nervous about glass with a newborn in the house — the inevitable drops, the 3am fumbles. Borosilicate glass is genuinely tough. It's taken a few knocks without so much as a chip.
- The teat has held up well. No splitting, no discolouration, no change in flow rate. It still performs exactly as it did on day one.
- Expressing directly into it saves time. This sounds like a small thing but when you're expressing multiple times a day, eliminating one transfer and one extra item to wash genuinely adds up.
What I'd Tell Another New Mum
If you're combination feeding and struggling with nipple confusion, the bottle you use matters more than I realised before I experienced it firsthand. A slow-flow teat that genuinely requires the baby to work — rather than just opening and letting milk pour — makes a real difference to whether they'll accept the breast afterwards.
And if you're on the fence about glass versus plastic: glass is heavier, yes, but it's cleaner, more durable, and doesn't carry any of the lingering uncertainty about plastics and heat. For something your baby is using multiple times a day, every day, I think that matters.
I wish I'd had this bottle from week one. It would have saved us both a lot of difficult evenings.
Where to Find It
The Lansinoh Glass Bottle 160ml is available directly from the store. You'll find it in our Baby Bottles collection and our Feeding Essentials range, alongside the rest of our Nursing & Feeding selection. Everything is also browsable across the Baby & Toddler department and the full catalogue.
If you're in the thick of early feeding challenges, I hope this helps. You're doing better than you think.
— Niamh Callahan, first-time mum and reluctant expert in 3am feeding logistics
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