During our guy's five week NICU stay, I would pump breast milk for the nurses to feed him. They started feeding him with an Enfamil slow flow nipple at 34 weeks gestation and he did really well; never needing a feeding tube. The nurse suggested bringing in our own bottles to see how he would do before taking him home (some advice we ignored).
When our son was discharged from the NICU at 38 weeks gestation, and just under 5 pounds, they gave us about 5 Enfamil nipples. These nipples say they're disposable so we did as they had done in the hospital and threw them away after one use; in the morning they were all gone. I was actually pretty excited to try out the Medela bottles I bought. They too had nipples labeled "slow flow" so I knew they'd work just the same... right?
Not all slow flow nipples are created equal. The Medela nipples left half his milk on his clothes. Milk poured down his chin and squirted out the sides of his mouth the whole time he was trying to eat. I declared I hated Medela nipples (more on them later) and we went in search of a solution.
After googling "the best nipples for preemies" without much satisfaction, and talking to the NICU staff, my husband ended up going back to the hospital to get more Enfamil nipples to tide us over until we found something else that worked. We decided to wash and reuse the disposable nipples, which works just fine by the way.
A couple days later I was at the baby store in that infamous bottle aisle (because I only had 3 bottles and even though no one tells you, you need more than that!). I ended up getting the Dr. Brown's bottles (more on these later) just because I liked the tall, skinny shape they had. The bottles came with slow flow, level 1 nipples but they also sold preemie nipples for them so I grabbed a 2 pack of those.
The Dr. Brown's preemie nipples worked great. All of the other "slow flow" nipples went in a marked container so we wouldn't have to deal with the frustration of accidentally grabbing and using one of them.
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