So you take away the bottle, you're not taking away just nutrition, you're taking away their great big symbol and that's really difficult. At that point, I would make it a little bit more of an incentive for the baby by starting to put more diluted milk into the bottle and more of the good stuff, the undiluted, into the cup. This way, baby gets the idea on her own that this cup tastes better. They are going to go for the cup because it's got something more familiar to them. There's also a point here that you really don't want the baby to be holding her own bottle because if she's holding her own bottle that means that she's going to have to give up a possession her bottle, her sweet bottle in order to pick up the cup.
Many babies regard that as a big insult.
So parents should always be the ones who give the bottle and then increasingly turn the cup over to the baby. A. A cheerful ability to put up with mess and a lot of compliments for the baby who's able to show that independence. You know parents get attached to the bottle also, partly because it's a sweet reminder of babyhood. But also because it's a lot less messy than a cup and it's easy for the baby to hold his own bottle and to feed himself. But that kind of arrangement makes it awfully hard to get the bottle away from the baby.