morning and night feeds only?

[Tootsmaloy]

My little one is now 8.5 months and I've breast fed her all the way although she's now on solids and eats 3 meals a day. She currently feeds around 4-5 times a day (first thing in the morning, last thing at night and then feeds interspersed between solid meals pretty much). We want to start TTC soon and id also like a little freedom in the afternoons where my husband can take care of DD and I don't need to rush back from wherever I am to give her a feed. So we are going to start by trying to switch a boob feed for a bottle feed in the afternoons and see how that goes, eventually doing the same for the mid-morning feed.

As she doesn't feed that often I already notice that my boobs take longer to 'fill up' than they used to (I.e. No rock boobs!) and my question is this....

Is it possible to just give 2 feeds a day? Morning and night. Can your body adjust to produce so little or will my supple just dry up and think that 2 feeds a day 12 hours apart is too little to make milk for?

This would be my ideal as DD would still have the comfort and ease of these feeds and still be getting some of mama's goodness

If like to hear back from anyone who has managed so few feeds successfully or also whether it didn't work and why (supply drying up etc).

 

[J_Anne]

At that age my daughter had dropped all her daytime feeds and chose to only feed morning and before bed. At around 10 months, I could feel my milk was dwindling at the night feed but she also wasn't as interested, one obviously affects the other but I don't know which occurred first!

 

[tiggy85]

I did similar at 9.5months as I went back to work, he had his mid morning and mid afternoon breastfeds replaced by formula then I continued to breast feed him with morning and evening feeds until 13 months. My supply obviously reduced as he was getting 600ml of formula so not sure how much he needed or wanted by evening and sometimes he messed about with bedtime feed and didn't want it. But morning feed was still very good right up till when I weaned.

So yes you can do two feeds a day and your supply will reduce but will settle to enable you to do so, I think I could have reduced the formula to 500ml to make the bedtime feed better? Not sure whether it would have done anyway as he was always a bit of a monkey with bedtime feed!

 

[cam]

Yes its possible I did this with my older 2 after they reached 1 year old , someone asked the same at the breastfeeding support group I go to recently and our advisor said your body will keep producing it until you stop, just slowly reduce the feeds so you dont get engorged .

 

[Jajis]

I went back to work part-time when my son was about 13 months old and we went down to feeds at his bedtime, if he woke overnight (which thankfully stopped a few months later), and when he woke in the morning. He still has those two feeds a day now, and he's 26 months now

Also, after being back at work a while my son wasn't very well (just a stinking cold, but he was miserable) and on the days that I was at home with him he went back to feeding a couple of times during the day as well, even though we'd reduced to two feeds several months earlier, so if you wanted to you could just continue to offer boob whenever you are around, and not bother when you're not there (by 8.5 months I'm not sure you even necessarily need to introduce a bottle to replace missed feeds, I've heard of people offering a yoghurt and a sippy cup with water instead for example).

Hope that helps