Help & advice?

[HopesDreams]

Hi girls. After lots of to'ing & fro'ing I intend to bottle/breast feed, assuming that baby latches & I have a good supply. Can't worry about that at this point though. I intend to breast feed but also express & stock up so that people can give bottles when i need to go away for longer periods of time. This is all good in theory but I guess I'm just wondering when & how to go about it all? I'm probably making it more complicated than it needs to be but it's melting my brain.

 

[Sunbeam638]

BevG is the expert really I'm sure shell post done handy tips

If I'm going to express I feed LO in mornings and express then because my supply is good. LO sleeps generally from 12-3 on and off so I breast feed and give a top up of 4oz formula between 4-5 then breast feed until 8-9 he has 5oz of formula then & I breast feed through the night.

I pre make both bottles in the morning pop in fridge then blast them 20s in microwave before he has them. Generally this works and now I'm slowly sussing out LO it's getting easier knowing when to give the formula xx

 

[BevG]

i generally dont express, in fact alyssa is only on 1 bottle at bedtime now but when i started combining the formula and bm it was mostly top ups, id express but for the most part i got very little and found it too tedious to bother with. most important is to express/ latch on baby every 2-3 hours especially at first, never miss a feed if you can help it and pump at least once during the night, or just latch baby and try to exclusively feed thru the night as this is when the most milk is produced and the hormones actually help you get back to sleep. i always tried to feed from the breast as much as possible and just give bottle after a bf feed if needed. she never had more than 5oz of formula in a bottle apart from during her 8 week growth spurt.

breast feeding is hard so dont feel bad if it dosent work out as you planned but id deffo say try to express or combi feed for as long as possible cos every little bit helps. if baby only gets the first feed in hospital of colostrum then even that is beneficial
good luck

 

[HopesDreams]

Am I wrong in thinking that I need to introduce the teat pretty early too so that I don't have a battle on my hands at a later date? While I'm on mat' leave for 9 months there are quite a few days that I'll have to return to work. It's not a legal requirement from work, it's just an agreement we came to. I want baby to go onto bottle easily. I'd feel awful if I was away for 6 hours & my poor mum had the most stressful 6 hours because baby wasn't familiar enough with the bottle teat. Does that make sense?

 

[BevG]

yeah it is easier if they have regular bottles from 4-6 weeks. if you leave too long between them then they may refuse it but its not a very common problem

 

[HopesDreams]

Thanks BevG. I'll torture you some more when I've had a think.