Planning to wind down breastfeeding

[Dotty_woman]

Can't believe my little Violet is almost 4 months old already. I'm going back to work in May and seriously think I am going to have to stop breastfeeding as I don't want to be at work with painful leaky boobs. I won't have time to express at work as I'm going to be working slightly longer hours to make up my time and can't afford on breaks to express. There is no way I can face expressing to replace all my feeds as I only seem to get a good amount first thing in the morning. If anyone else has switched to formula completely from breast, I would be grateful if you could advise how you did this successfully. Violet almost had a 12 hour sleep last night and I woke up with a really painful boob. I'm assuming I need to slowly start trying to introduce a bottle of formula whilst maintaining breastfeeding. I'm going to be sad to stop as we've had a great few months bonding with breastfeeding but I'm going to be stressed enough going back to work and need to keep my sanity. xxx

 

[SaraLouise]

I just did it one feed at a time, I started with the bedtime bottle as that was his favourite booby feed & I thought it was better to get that one out the way first, probably just left it with just one bottle for about a week-10 days then just swapped a booby feed for a bottle every 4 or 5 days. Your boobies will probably be a bit sore but by the time you are down to one booby feed a day (our afternoon nap feed went on for a few weeks as I couldn't bare to let go altogether lol) your supply will have settled down then when you build up the courage to stop compeltely it won't hurt so much.

Well done for getting so far with bfing hun, its a wondeful thing but I also know how distressing & difficult it can be at times. You really have given little V the best start to her life!

 

[Dotty_woman]

Thanks hun. Think I'll start with the last feed of the day and take it from there. Sounds like a good idea. xxx

 

[BunnyN]

Do you work for yourself? If you work for a company I think they are legally required to give you breaks to express? That may not be what you want anyway. I think I'd find expressing on a regular basis really hard. Don't forget you can always keep on doing morning and evening feeds if you want to. your breasts will get used to it and adjust your supply so you shouldn't have to deal with being sore and leaky once you are in a routine. Hope it goes well.

 

[tiggy85]

ditto I went back to work and didn't express, he had two to three formula feeds in the day then a bf morning and evening. We did this till he was a year and it was the best of both worlds.