'Crazy baby' !

[fifitot]

Well that's what my DH calls DS when he begins his crazy baby act from about 5pm every day! He changes from a calm placid baby into a squealing, wriggling maniac!

On and off the nipple all night til he flakes out at 10pm. Until then there is apparently no sating him! However he screams to be fed and then when he gets near then starts pushing my boob away, crying!

He also has mad, staring eyes and his arms quiver!

I know this is evening 'fussiness' or even cluster feeding and I have been told it will pass. However I find it quite strange. I guess babies this young (8 weeks) are just still slaves to primitive instincts.

Anyone else's cluster feeding resemble this?

Hey,

My DD is 4 weeks and this is EXACTLY what she does. It has me on my knees every night as I do get pain from long stretches of BF. DP looks on while we both cry and I exclaim that I "really giving up this time".....of course I never do, too stubborn. To keep myself sane I insist DP takes her for 20 minutes while I lie face down in a hot bath - helps with pain and milk flow so I can get through the final stretch, even though it means she'll cry for 20 minutes - I am forced to be selfish to survive and feel horrible doing it.

DD sometimes cluster feeds all morning as well :-(

I expected breastfeeding to be 30 minutes at regular 2-4 hour intervals, no one told me I'd be unable to rise from the sofa all evening.

You are so not alone....

Zimm - if you're in pain, even during marathon sessions, get help. You should be able to feed without that pain.

My DD is a serial comfort sucker and although we sometimes need to latch and re-atch a dozen times, we remain pain free. The latch adjustment is actually very important, as otherwise she relaxes too much and ends up nipple sucking.

Sorry, forgot to respond to the OP too Yes, our evenings were like this quite often in the early days. It does get better :)

Zimm and Jem - thanks for replies. Nice to know we are not alone. Zimm - agree with Jem, it shouldn't hurt. My nipples get a bit sore just from overuse i think but not really painful and a bit of Lanisoh sorts them out.

At the risk of hijacking this thread (sorry OP) but I think the reason I have pain is flat nipples, we're going to a BF clinic on weds to get more help with latching, but the nipple shape really doesn't help...

You have my sympathies. I have quite flat nipples and spent most of my time pinching them into a suitable shape to get DD latched on. It's a pain in the butt!

does he have any other symptoms OP? - just wondering incase he's slightly colic-y and maybe some infacol or gripe water might help? or you could lay him on his change mat and gently cycle his legs in the air - this can help if he's suffering a bit with trapped wind. - or if you can manage to have a change of scenery as soon as you feel he's had a good feed - e.g. could you take him for a walk in a baby carrier, so he has the comfort of being close and you know he's been fed and that will hopefully stretch him out a bit between feeds, so he's genuinely ready for the feed next time, rather than perhaps wanting to suckle for comfort? - and if you need a break by then, DH could take him and enjoy some time with him after work too?

Or once DH is home, could you have a bath with him if he's particularly fractious? - found this helped lots with DS - the skin-to-skin is comforting and they generally latch on straight away too. Never managed it with DD as it always was too busy with 2 of them and I felt I missed out with her as it was lovely and bonding. (obviously the bath is with DS not DH but it helps if he's around to get in and out etc.!)

But I appreciate it's a busy time of day so none of these suggestions may be practical! (And forgive me if you've tried them all!) good luck.

Infacol helps mine a bit with this. Particularly with the wanting to feed, then refusing it bit. Do they do it in a non-orange-flavoured version BTW, DS finds it rather offensive and I don't blame him, he's only ever had milk before and suddenly he gets orange flavour!

Also, sometimes mine gets to the point where he isn't really feeding, he is a little, but nothing worthwhile, so it's mostly comfort. At that point I unlatch him and give him to his dad to jiggle around for a bit. If I try to take him for a walk/give him a cuddle or soothe him without feeding, he takes offence as he can smell my milk, but for DP he will calm down and be pleasant for a bit, which gives me a half hour or so of respite before he gets properly hungry again.

all sounds very familiar! yesterday 7-week-old ds fed almost constantly from 3pm-midnight, getting increasingly frantic. you hear people describing cluster feeding as feeding 'as often as once an hour' - not literally constantly, switching from side to side!

Thanks everyone. He does suffer with wind and have tried Infacol - not sure if it is working or not but will persevere. I think the suggestions about DH helping out with soothing is a good idea too. Have got the baby carrier out with a view to using that too.

Thanks again. I am not finding this particularly stressful but hoping it settles down soon as can't even eat my tea at the moment!

My 15 wk old dd has finally stopped cluster feeding (desperately hoping she isn't listening and decides to prove me wrong). She did indeed feed as often as every hour when clustering. For 60 minutes at a time.

But it does end.

Y'know, I'm beginning to think there's a vast conspiracy to keep cluster feeding a secret from mums-to-be planning to breastfeed.

There's a few 'cluster feed survivors' I recognise here (hello Emster30). I think having to deal with a hungry, fussing, fretful baby for hours and hours is SO hard (maybe that's why no one tells us in advance...). Mollycuddles, your 'once an hour 60 minute feed' made me laugh.

Serious point - I think a lot of mums give up BF at this point because they think they haven't got enough milk. I listened to a friend last week talk about how she 'knew' she didn't have enough milk because her 2 week old DD would start feeding at 6pm and still be going at 11pm. And I thought - but that's what my DS did. I saw it as a stage in the great breastfeeding duet between mother and baby of supply and demand. My friend gave a 'top up' bottle of formula because she was convinced her DD was starving - but then in all likelihood, that contributed to her supply decreasing, so the 'not enough milk' thing became a self fulfilling prophecy.

Anyway, that's an aside really, but I DO wish the WAY that newborns can breastfeed was a much bigger part of BF education. I went into it with 'newborns can feed as much as 9-12 times in a 24 hour period...'. Ha. Ha ha ha ha. Often, I wouldn't even know what counted as a 'feed.' I couldn't really point to a middle or an end.

Good luck with your crazy baby, fifiot - at times it's been my baby and me both with the mad staring eyes and quivering arms...

My 3-week old does this - not every evening, but every now and then he'll get totally frantic - panting, growling (!) shoving his fists into his mouth even with my boob in front of him.

The biggest trouble is that this sets me laughing at him - which makes aiming a nipple into his mouth rather difficult!

Oh, and surely it's easy to know that you still have enough milk - even after 4 hours of fairly continuous sucking I can still squirt him in the eye with a quick squeeze - although by the end of the evening I'm feeding him something that looks more like single cream than the watery coconut milk of a fresh boob!

Hah! I'm with barkfox& on this one(I seem to just show up on these threads and agree with barkfox - I promise she's not paying me). DS is nearly 6 wks and the first 4 weeks he went from 6-11pm every night, feeding constantly and screaming if he wasn't feeding. I survived by handing him over to DH for burping, changing, etc so I could get up off the chair and stretch, eat dinner MN, or brush my teeth at bedtime... It's much better now, and I was even warned about it - but how on earth can you prepare for it?! I had a comfy chair, a supportive DH doing EVERYTHING else in the house, making me food, walking the dog - but I did get incredibly frustrated, fed up of having to be the one feeding - and just 'touched out' - I like some time to myself and felt so drained by DS's endless need...it made me frustrated with him, which I then felt guilty about. Not fun!

BFing is much easier now (though the last 2 days have been pretty heavy on the feeding - 6wk growth spurt, maybe?) and he'll even agree to be put down a bit now, for up to 20 minutes a time in his chair - but yeah, sometimes I don't know when a feed starts or stops, and sometimes I think "I'm going to give you some formula - just as a sedative!"
Happily for him we don't have any in the house, and I can't be arsed to go and buy any. Expressing milk is going ok and so I can send him out with DH and a bottle (Or leave them here and go out) - and they're absolutely fine. So I'm freer than I was a week ago, and I have to consider that a sign of things to come.

Mums of clusterfeeding babies unite! Brandish your lansinoh and stiff backs with pride - you have nothing to lose but your evenings, minds, and pretty bras!

Ah, blackcurrant, we are clearly having EXACTLY the same experience, and have the same model of DS! I too have a supportive DP and still feel frustrated [guilty emoticon] and all the rest of it.

Thank heavens for expressing and being able to have the odd break.

yup, good to know others are going through it! last night i went out to choir practice and left 150ml of expressed milk, which DS downed within 45 minutes of me leaving the house. for the next 2 hours apparently DH had to pace up and down with him... That milk took me ages to express, goddammit! What a greedy little thing.

i agree about the silliness of the advice. What is a 'feed'? sometimes he has a day of discrete feeds but most often it's a day of on/off nibbling. hmm.

Are you all me? DS (just over three weeks old) is generally a fairly calm baby but he goes bonkers in the evenings and wants to feed non-stop for hours (and yesterday he wanted to feed all morning too). And why does no-one tell you how tiring breastfeeding is? I start the evening feeling fairly OK and four hours later, after non-stop feeding, I'm on my knees with exhaustion and desperate for DS to go to sleep. I haven't succeeded in expressing any milk yet so I'm chained to the sofa all evening, and it's really frustrating. Glad to know I'm not alone, though - I've had evenings when I've wondered whether there's something dreadfully wrong with DS because he seems so frantic.

same same same. DS is 12 weeks, and for the last 11 seems tto be in a never ending growth spurt.... yep bf is tiring. am more tired now than was post labour.....

I heard 12 weeks is about when they stop. Fingers crossed for us all then!

Yeah, fingers crossed for us all! It HAS to get better, if only so we can take over the shift of happy BFing women who come on these threads to reassure new mothers with "it will get better, I promise!"