Nobody tells you how hard the first few weeks actually are. You read the books, you go to the classes, you think you're prepared. And then your baby arrives and you realise that prepared and ready are two very different things.
My daughter Leila was born in October. She was healthy, she was perfect, and she would not latch consistently. Not for lack of trying — we had three different midwives attempt to help us in the first 48 hours, and while we made progress, it was slow and painful and exhausting in a way I hadn't anticipated. By day four I was in tears at 3am, my husband Arjun was in tears at 3am, and Leila was screaming.
We needed a bottle. But I wasn't ready to stop breastfeeding.
The Problem With Most Bottles
Every parent I'd spoken to who'd tried to combine breastfeeding with bottle feeding had warned me about nipple confusion — the risk that a baby who gets used to the fast, easy flow of a standard bottle teat will start refusing the breast because it requires more effort. I'd heard enough stories about this to be genuinely worried. I didn't want to introduce a bottle and lose breastfeeding entirely. I just needed some relief, some flexibility, and a way for Arjun to take a feed so I could sleep for more than two hours at a stretch.
Why I Chose the Philips Avent Natural Response
I did my research at 2am, which is not ideal, but parenthood doesn't wait for business hours. The Philips Avent Natural Response Glass Bottle kept coming up in discussions about combination feeding specifically. The key feature that caught my attention was the Natural Response teat: it only releases milk when the baby is actively drinking. When they pause — to breathe, to swallow, to rest — the flow stops. That mirrors exactly what happens at the breast, where milk doesn't flow passively but requires active feeding.
The glass construction was the other factor. I'd been slightly wary of plastic bottles for a newborn, and the borosilicate glass felt like the right call — pharmaceutical-grade, BPA-free, heat resistant, compatible with all sterilisation methods. The 120ml size was appropriate for a newborn's small feeds. The slow-flow teat (Flow 2) meant Leila would have to work for her milk in the same way she would at the breast. I ordered two bottles at 2:47am and went back to trying to feed her.
The First Feed
The bottles arrived two days later. Arjun gave Leila her first bottle feed that evening — expressed milk, slow flow, everything as recommended. She took it. She didn't fuss, didn't gulp, didn't seem overwhelmed by the flow. She fed at a pace that looked, genuinely, like how she fed at the breast: active sucking, natural pauses, no gulping air.
I watched from the sofa, half-expecting disaster, and instead felt something I hadn't felt in days: relief. Arjun could feed her. I could sleep. We had a way through.
The Weeks That Followed
We combination fed for the first twelve weeks. Leila breastfed during the day and took one or two bottle feeds in the evening and overnight, which meant Arjun could share the load and I could get enough sleep to function. She never showed any signs of nipple confusion. She moved between breast and bottle without protest, which I attribute almost entirely to the Natural Response teat doing what it claimed to do.
The anti-colic valve made a noticeable difference too. Leila had been quite gassy in her first week — uncomfortable, unsettled, hard to wind. After we introduced the Avent bottles, the evening fussiness reduced significantly. Whether that was the valve, the slower feeding pace, or just Leila settling in, I can't say for certain. But the timing was hard to ignore.
The glass itself held up beautifully. We sterilised these bottles daily for three months. They went in the steam steriliser, in the fridge, in the bottle warmer. Not a crack, not a scratch on the inside, no staining from formula. They cleaned easily and stayed clear. I'd been slightly worried about the practicality of glass with a newborn — the weight, the fragility — but at 120ml it's a small bottle, and the weight was never an issue.
Looking Back
Leila is five months old now. We've moved on from the 120ml bottles to larger sizes as her feeds have grown, but those first twelve weeks would have been significantly harder without these. The ability to share feeding — to hand Arjun a bottle and sleep for four hours — was not a luxury. It was what kept us both sane during the hardest stretch of our lives.
If you're expecting, or in the thick of those early weeks and trying to figure out how to make combination feeding work without losing breastfeeding, this is the bottle I'd recommend without hesitation. You'll find it in the Baby Bottles, Nursing & Feeding, Feeding Essentials, and Baby & Toddler collections.
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