Waking baby to BF

[varicoseveined]

Hello it's me again :)

My DS is 2 weeks old, born at 35+1, spent the first week in NICU/SCBU. While in NICU he was bottle fed EBM and also fed via NG tube and given a dummy to settle him.

I was advised to top up breastfeeding with a bottle of EBM, and he was on four hourly feeds. He was weighed by the MW a couple of days ago and is at birth weight.

He's always fed better at night and is more alert then, though he is gradually getting more alert in the mornings. However what bothers me is that he's hard to wake at times. The HV advised that as DS was premature he'd be too tired to BF every 2 hours as I was doing and to let him go 3-4 hours and wake him to feed then. I called a LLL counsellor who's advised the opposite, basically kangaroo care (which helped a lot in NICU) and skin to skin contact to make him BF more, and she said that he should be at the breast as often as possible, every couple of hours at the least.

I suppose I'm asking for the MN jury for your thoughts. I want to exclusively BF as I did with my DD, what's the best way to go about this and has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks for reading this far!

LLL counsellor probably knows more about breastfeeding than the HV. If you have him skin to skin and give him lots of opportunity to breastfeed does he root more often?

I'd go with the LLL one based on advice I've seen here & that dd3 sees 4 hours as often at 16 weeks so seems a lot for a tiny

Hi. My DS was born at 32 weeks, and when i got him home (at 36 wks) I stuck to their advice of feeding every 3 hours during the day. However when he didn't wake in the night, I didn't wake him - which was actually against their advice.

He did wake pretty close to this though, and I think it worked pretty well to get him into his own routine of feeding/waking rather than encouraging him to be awake a lot in the night when he wasn't actually hungry - does that make sense?

Maybe just try seeing how he gets on while you bf on demand - I don't think he'd wake up unless he was hungry? I felt a bit selfish at first but realised if he was asleep he was happy and not hungry, and when I tried to wake him for a feed he was grumpy and not in the mood!

4 hours does seem a long time, could you try more often and see how he goes? If he gets tired and doesnt feed for long then you can always change things. I know the rules are different for prem babies but agree that the HV might not nec be the best source of bf info.

MoonUnitAlpha - unfortunately I've no had much chance to give the skin to skin contact as I have a busy 3 yr old, but she's going out tomorrow so I'll make the most of the time then.

Nymphadora - I must say I'm leaning more towards that POV

berri - DS wakes up every couple of hours during the night anyway and that's when he chooses to be sociable and alert . I'm just paranoid concerned that if I left him to it, he'd sleep too long and miss feeds and then lose weight.

This evening he woke up and DH gave him a bottle of EBM and he downed 70mls, quite a lot for him...

I don't think you need to be worried about him losing weight (although I'm completely not an expert, just a mum) as if he was hungry he'd wake and want feeding - in my experience with both DS and other prem babies they want to sleep when they're asleep and trying to wake them to feed doesn't really work.

They put on weight gradually without you making them wake (not suggesting you're forcing him btw). Maybe just try doing it on demand for 2 weeks and if you're concerned about his weight gain you could switch to waking him?

Realised I hadn't said congratulations btw :)

It doesn't always work like that berri, as a baby can sleep to conserve energy if they're not feeding enough, rather than sleeping because they're full/satisfied. Also things like jaundice can make babies too sleepy to wake to feed.

Not saying that either of these things apply to the OP's baby, but just pointing out that feeding on demand doesn't always work for all babies.

Yes completely agree actually - just saying my experience was that way round.

Agree with your advice to listen to bf counsellor - hope you can find one close to you who can help.

Going to bed now as DS is coming down with cold and anticipating an early start :)

Best of luck, and repost if you still have problems.