Introducing bottles of expressed milk

[rollerbaby]

Please help - I need advice on introducing bottles to my nearly 6 week old son. Are there any tips you can offer? What time of day, how much for a 13-14 lb, should I breast feed before or after the feed?

I've tried to get him on bottles with varying degrees of success since 2/3 weeks. I gave up with expressing in the early days as I found it too hard to do, but now I really want to get going and today my expressed milk definitely felt far greater than a few weeks ago.

I've got Dr Browns and NUK and Avent bottles... However he screams generally after a minute or two and seems to get awful wind halfway through...

Please help!

if your still wanting to breast feed but express, the best way i found is to get someone else to feed your baby the bottle as your baby recognises you with the breast i hope it helps

I agree with cara - ask someone else to give the first few bottles, also make sure the ebm is really really warm (my dd likes it verrry hot).

My DS has his hot too, wont even look at it warm! :)

I had this until I used a vari-flow teat (mine are tommee tippee) but I think slow flow may work too.

OK, my tips:

1.I use Avent bottles and teats - I express 90% of feeds for various reasons, but when I do put DS on the boob he still latches fine so I guess those teats mimic the breast pretty well.

1. Time of day - maybe try when he's not at his most ravenous so he won't suck so hard/fight/yell and give himself wind.

3.If you are BF as well, I would do that first, then offer the bottle, because direct BF is always preferable.

1. Maybe he screams because he's both hungry and confused that he's not on the breast. Another reason to offer breast first to take the edge of his hunger before introducing the bottle

1. to reduce the wind - keep the teat size at the lowest possible and always make sure whoever feeds him keeps the bottle at an angle so the teat is always full.

1. Teat size: At seven weeks we moved up from the Philips newborn flow teat (number zero) to the number 1. If he seems to be working really hard to get the milk out, and the muscles round his eyes are bulging a bit, try the next flow up. If he gags/continues to get bad wind, keep with the newborn flow.

1. Warm or hot milk good, my DS doesn't care about temp though and sometimes if he's really hollering I serve it at room temperature just to get it to him faster and calm him down. When he's wound up and upset he tends to get windier with the feed than if he's sucking calmly and is relaxed.

1. My DS is nearly 11 weeks and 15.5lb. Congratulations, your DS sounds wonderfully well at 13-14lb at six weeks! On days when I exclusively express and give DS as much as I feasibly can get out of my body he takes a litre, this hasn't really changed since he was a few weeks old despite him getting bigger.

Hope helpful!