Laura Bottiglieri

When Bottle Aversion Took Over Her Holiday You know the feeling. You're sat at the table, or on the sand, or in the queue for ice cream, and everyone around you is laughing, present, soaking it in. And you're there too, physically. Your feet are in the sand. Your hands are around a coffee cup. But your mind has slipped somewhere else entirely, running a list, checking the time, half-listening to a conversation you'll have no memory of later. Most of the time, we don't even notice it...

There's a moment I've come to recognise in almost every family I work with. It usually arrives somewhere in the first conversation, sometimes even before we've properly started. It's not something they say outright. It's something underneath what they say, a shift in the way they're sitting, the way they're listening, the way they answer a question. Some families arrive desperate. Others arrive ready. And the difference between the two changes almost everything about what happens next....

I sat with a family the other day who had reached the kind of desperate I don't think anyone truly understands until they've lived inside it. Their baby hadn't taken more than an ounce per bottle in two months. Two months of trying everything, searching everywhere, and still, an ounce. Maybe less on the harder days. They told me no one had helped them. Not because no one had tried, health visitors, doctors, forums full of well-meaning strangers, but because none of it had actually moved the...