I guess all parents expect to fight with their kids at some point. I just didn't figure on entering into mortal combat with my daughter when she was just three months old.

And losing.

'Oi! You think you're David Beckham or what?' I cried, as Yakuza Baby kicked her bottle out of my hand onto the floor for the umpteenth time. 'Or maybe Mariah Carey,' I muttered as she then broke into a high-pitched yowl.

With summer ending, the Wife has to go back to her university to teach, so I told her I'd stay home and bottlefeed the baby during the hours she's away. It should have been a piece of cake.

After all, during the first six weeks after bringing Yakuza Baby home from the hospital, I bottlefed her during the wee hours of the morning, so the Wife could have at least a few hours of unbroken sleep.

But for some bizarre reason, she was now vehemently rejecting all attempts to put anything other than Mummy's nipple in her mouth - even though the bottle also contained breastmilk, often freshly expressed.

'I think she's just acquired a taste for my breast and now feels everything else is an inadequate substitute,' said the Wife.

'Oh great,' I rolled my eyes. 'A three- month-old food critic. K.F. Seetoh, tepi sikit.'

At first, when I'd stick the teat into her mouth, Yakuza Baby would make a face not dissimilar to the ones my ang moh friends would make whenever I introduced them to durian or century eggs.

Then she would spit it out, and scream. Thereafter, if I so much as came within spitting distance with the bottle in my hand, she would shriek like an extra from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

'This website says it's common,' the Wife said, showing me the forum page of La Leche League International (www.llli.org), North America's leading breastfeeding support group.

What an appropriate name, I thought. 'Leche' is Spanish for 'milk', but it also sounds awfully like the Malay word for 'troublesome'. The general consensus among the forum posters was that the solution was finding a teat the baby would accept - and preferably have someone other than mummy do the feeding so that baby won't smell the maternal goodness she'd much prefer. The problem was that this 'someone other' was invariably no one other than daddy - which wasn't much help in my case.

I then checked with my daddy friends. But while I was cheered to note that I was far from alone in my experience, their response was pretty much the same: Try out different teats till you get the right one.

So the next day, I went a-teat hunting. (I couldn't shake the image in my head of myself as Elmer Fudd, tiptoeing with a finger on my lips, saying, 'Be vewwy, vewwy quiet, I'm hunting nippews!') At the Babies R' Us superstore, I bought one of every single bottle-and-teat combo available.

'Amazing,' I told the Wife as I emptied my haul on the coffee table. 'So many companies claiming that their product most closely approximates the human breast. If only they had told me back in school how much money one could make from studying boobies, my career path would have been entirely different.' She gave me a look that would have curdled a pot of laksa from 10 paces away.

Over the next few days, we experimented. Each time, the Wife would duck out of the house, placing herself safely beyond Yakuza Baby's olfactory radar, while I test-drove the different teats.

There was the one supposed to provide the mouthfeel of an actual nipple, another with mock areola, and the one which claimed it could mimic the suction and compression of actual breastfeeding. I tried nipples with faster flow, slower flow, specially cut holes, rubber, silicone, everything.

And failed every single time. Yakuza Baby reacted to each and every teat like someone discovering that her Central Provident Fund was invested with Bernie Madoff.

So now I'm at my wits' end, and have no choice but to ask you, my dear readers, if you have any suggestions or tips to share. Has your baby ever refused a bottle, and what did you do to remedy the situation? Please e-mail me at: [email protected], and I'll try everything short of child abuse and present the findings in my next column. (Your identity will be kept confidential, not to worry.)

Whoever provides me with a solution that works will have my undying gratitude. I wish I could give a more valuable prize but I recently spent a lot of money on baby bottles and teats.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.