Does anyones elses FF baby have a couple of mouthfuls, fall asleep, then want the rest later?

[CrapBag]

DD is only 12 days. I BF for 5 days but she fed soooo much and I have M.E. and a 3 year old to look after that we switched to bottles. At first, it was so much better.

Now though, she sometimes takes 3oz, sometimes 4oz but she keeps wanting little feeds after about an hour to an hour and a half. Now she is asking for a feed, we make it up and she has a couple of mouthfuls and falls asleep. Then she may want it about half an hour later. This is getting pretty tedious, particularly at night.

Any hints or tips or do we just go with it and wait for her to regulate her feeds more?

DD has always done this to a certain extent. Even now at 5 months during the day she will drink 2 or 3 oz then want the rest up to 2 hours later (after which her milk is chucked). She never drinks more than about 6oz in a go, but usually not this much. However this stopped at night pretty quickly as DD wakes up properly hungry, drinks what she wants and goes back to sleep. I think this may be because she has a dream feed when I go to bed and then sometimes has one more bottle in the night but sometimes doesn't. I didn't find it possible to dream feed to begin with, but after a while it started to work. What works for me is to take sterilised bottles and cartons of milk to bed so that if she wakes up I can just tip the carton into the bottle and never have to get up. But I don't imagine this would work if she is feeding that frequently. Are you sure that she is waking for milk each time and not just for comfort? A baby's sleep cycle is about 45min I think, so it could just be that she is waking up at that point and wants to be held. The other thing that works for us is that we cosleep - DD is in a cot attached to our bed. This means that if she wakes I pull her over to me and doze with her, then if she doesn't go back to sleep I know she needs feeding. However I know that whether to cosleep is a very personal decision and it might not help anyway. I hope you find a solution or she grows out of it soon.

Does she have a dummy CrapBag. For some formula fed babies I think they're pretty much essential for those times when they're noy hungry but they want to suck.

If my DD was bottle fed (and she did have some in the early days) I am convinced she would be a grazer - I reckon some babies just are. That being the case I would be thinking about making up two smaller bottles rather than one. If they are made up according to the instructions they can be stored in the fridge quite safely for a few hours. At least then you're not potentially wasting an entire feed (which would drive me totally mental). Basically the same approach you would use to avoid wasting EBM.

Insert question mark. For "noy" read "not".

Actually - now I think about it the dummy idea is great. DD was really sucky - spent the first couple of months sucking my little finger, but not interested in a dummy. She has now found her thumb and can settle herself so much better. At night I am sometimes woken by the sound of furious thumb sucking, though this generally indicates hunger now.

I personally am not a fan of dummies. DS didn't have one and I have seen the nightmares that people I know have had when their DC loses them dummy and wakes for it, can't be doing with that. If a child hasn't had it, they won't miss it.

She doesn't feed like this at night (thankfully). She has a feed about 10.30-11, then again early hours of the morning then about 9.30 so she is good at night (apart from the general noise she makes when asleep!). It seems to be in the afternoons. She is definitely hungry. If we put her on our shoulder, she does this thing with her head where she is trying to latch on to any part of us and snuffles away, its actually really cute . She is also rooting so we can tell that it is food that she wants. If she just wants a cuddle she will just lay there on us.

She has taken a few bigger feeds today though, all 3 and half to 4 ounces, so hoping she is starting to sort herself out, but we have't reached later afternoon yet. She did take 40 minutes to have 3 and a half ounces though as she doses off, then wakes for a bit more.

CrapBag I'm not a fan of dummies either believe me, but if my very very sucky DD would have taken one she would have had one, believe me! Some babies really really want to suck almost all the time, and allowing them to satisfy their sucking needs from a bottle is what can lead to overfeeding. It was just a thought anyway.

Too many believe me's there.

Umm, Crapbag - if she doesn't feed all night, just at the times you said and she just grazes a bit in the afternoon, then I am not sure what the problem is. I think she is just demand fed and it sounds perfectly reasonable for a 12 day old baby. Remember her stomach is tiny stomach sizes so I wouldn't really expect her to drink much in one go. You can keep a made up bottle for 2 hours (I think, refer to instructions on formula pack), so you don't need to make it up again if she wants it 30 min later. She sounds gorgeous.

DS was like this when he was tiny; feeding is interrupting their sleeping!

Could you experiment with teat sizes? DS went up to a size 2 teat within the first 6 weeks as I remember; otherwise he'd take a few sucks, get bored and doze off again! I also found because the teat was drippier, he remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

breathslowly the 'problem' (not a huge deal I know ) is that she will take a couple of sucks, then finish, sometimes want some more as soon as you lay her down, sometimes its an hour later or just over. Guidlines say to keep bottle for an hour only.

Just the last few days, it feels like all we have done is spend hours constantly feeding her, putting her down, she gets grizzly, has a little more feed, falls asleep on us etc etc.

Seriously CrapBag, it does sound like she needs a dummy. And it really can be a need. Bottle fed babies really can be deprived of that comfort sucking otherwise. Unless you're prepared to sit there for hours with your little finger in her mouth until she eventually finds her thumb.

I would agree with Gaelic. BF babies can just sit and suckle without getting milk (because BF isn't just for nutrition, whereas the bottle is), but bottle fed babies need something to replicate that.

If you've time, you can also let her suckle on you which she will probably really enjoy (watch that latch). I have seen previously that you don't want to mix feed so I appreciate that this may not be an option, but if you ever feel that you would be comfortable with it, it may work as you're taking the pressure off you as being her food source.

Aptamil says it can be kept for 2 hours once started, this is what we do. I guess I don't see it as a problem as I only have 1 child (so wasn't trying to run after another) and was so immobile after DD's birth that I didn't have anything else to do but hold her, feed her and let her suck my little finger. I imagine that if you aren't in that position then it is very time consuming.

I know some guildlines say 1 hour, some say 2. My MW told me when we switched to FF from BF that we weren't to keep the bottle for more than an hour so this is what I am going by.

Just out of interest, how are you making up your bottles? I find the whole 'boiling kettle and letting it cool for 30 minutes' each time extremely impratical, what baby is going to wait for 30 minutes when they are fed on demand!

I'm not sure why you would follow the guidelines of a MW for this - she is not an expert in formula feeding. I would follow the WHO guidelines which are here and say 2 hours. I think that the NHS guidelines are the same and generally they are considered definitive.

We only use ready made cartons as we are lazy. It is great once your baby is drinking about a carton full not to have to get out of bed to get a night time feed as I keep the milk and bottles with me (as well as DD).

If I was using powder I would either make up a day's worth and store as per the WHO guidelines (section 3.1.3) or I would keep cooled boiled water in the fridge in a sterile container for max 24 hours and when I wanted a bottle I would boil a kettle then mix the right proportions of boiled water and cooled boiled water to make about 70 degrees (3 boiled to 1 cooled) then add powder and shake. Then add remaining cooled boiled water to get to drinking temperature. This is a bit fiddly and would involve working out all of the measurements as you need to be careful to get the right temperature to start and the right final volume as 8oz of water + powder makes more than 8oz of milk.

A friend of mine, who is a teacher, said that 70 degrees isn't hot enough to kill bacteria anyway. I have also heard this from others.

My MW did give me guidelines as she said the 'official' instructions that they are told to give contradict each other. IE, you are suppose to make up each feed fresh, but if you are out and about, you can take the right amount of powder with you and mix it into cooled boiled water that is already in the bottle, this is why she said only keep for 1 hour, not 2. She said don't keep it for 24 hours though (the colled boiled water, not the feed) and try and make them as fresh as possible. This is how we made feeds for DS and all of my friends have done exactly the same. I remember my previous MW telling me the same as well.

Can't afford the convenience of cartons, unfortunately.

I think that the point of the guidelines is to suggest the best and then next best options, based on scientific research. I agree that this is not what most people do. Different temperatures kill different bacteria and they know which ones are found in powdered milk. I really don't think MW are experts in this compared to WHO.

Crapbag, mixing the powder into cooled boiled water is NOT current/official advice. The important thing is that the powder goes into 70c water - it's best to make it fresh every time, but if necessary second best is to make it up with 70c water, cool quickly and keep in the back of the fridge for no more than 24 hours.

The Dept of Health guidelines explain how to make a feed fresh, and how to make them in advance - might find this useful?

DoH guidelines

I worry that the new guidance is doing more harm than good, since as CrapBag says it is totally impractical for demand feeding. Not many people realise you can store the made up bottles as long as they are made up correctly to begin with, so they may resort to using water at less than 70 degrees.

I think they recommend 70 degrees because any hotter can destroy some of the components. I never realised that so god knows what nutritional value was left by the time I'd blasted the stuff with boiling water.

CrapBag - have you given any thought to a dummy? Is your DD settling down at all?

The DoH guidelines do allow for making feeds in advance though.

Yes I see that, didn't spell it out but yes that's a good thing. But they do say it is preferred to make up the feed fresh, so when I was ff DS that's what I tried to do (I think the guidance might have changed while I was feeding him actually). I tried to follow the guidelines for about 2 days, at which point I used the method described below of mixing hot and cold water to try to achieve 70 degrees quickly. But I reckon it's safer to just make them in advance rather than guessing temperatures.