Weight Percentiles

[Ryan161]

Hi everyone,

First post from me on here, I wondered if you could help.

We had our twins at 37+1. Our little girl was 5lb3 and our little boy was 5lb14. They're now at 7lb4 and 7lb10 on their 7 week birthday.

This last week they've dropped slightly from the 2nd percentile curve on the weight chart, to the 0.4.

They have been taking c900-1,000ml per day for the last 10 days or so of express milk and they have been full from that - from what we can tell.

We had the HV round yesterday and she says they're dropping and we need to ramp up the feeding which makes sense, but, it feels so hard as they can take an hour to feed at the increased level of 130ml (up from 100ml) every 3 hours. And, when we do try to feed them often they just don't want that much and they push the bottle away.

Also, last night we set alarms to wake them up to feed 3 hourly as suggested by HV and they were fast asleep happily and obviously didn't feed great.

Has anyone else been in this spot? Any ideas and thoughts would be appreciated. I think we may need to formula top ups too soon, I'm incredibly proud of my wife for making 2,000ml of milk express wise for them, but, much more seems so hard whilst balancing both.

Thanks,
Ryan

I've never done it but I understand that exclusively expressing is incredibly hard. Could your wife talk through all of this with a BFC on one of the BFing Helplines? The BFC will also be able to talk to her about how she's feeling about all of this.

Have you got the numbers?

I never had to do wakeups but our son dropped below 0.4th centile after coming home (he never lost weight, just gained too slowly) - I was breastfeeding and I was first asked to express an extra feed to give him each day. He was a complete bottle refuser and we could never get him to take it so we were admitted to hospital for 3 days if feeding observation at 2m. He was prescribed with high-calorie formula for topups (as well as reflux medication) but again he refused the bottle and got very distressed (we tried several kinds etc but to no avail). I managed to stop needing nipple shields for feeding and his weekly weight gain doubled from 50g to 100g just from that, but it wasn't enough. Sadly at 4m I got a breast abscess and had to be in hospital for surgery without my son for a week, so the bottle was his only option. He took the bottle fine after the first night, and put on 400g in that one week. I was beside myself because going full time on the high calorie formula sorted him out but breastfeeding was so important to me. I was advised by my surgeons that I should give up feeding completely because of my abscess so I did have to stop there (obv I was worried that I would mess up his feeding if I started again when he'd just got back on the level). He's 18m this week and on 50th centile. It's a very stressful process and you get quite obsessed with the weighing etc. Be kind to yourselves and if you need support, push for it. Get them to talk you through the NHS weight gain pathway and where you are in it. It will get better; for us it took a long long time, but for lots of people it's not too bad and once they take the extra feeds things may even put pretty quickly. Good luck, and remember of you're happy with the breastmilk, then you do not have to give it up (the paediatrician actually told me to give up the extra expressed feed because the physical contact of breastfeeding was so important).