please help! hardly any milk during the night

[nello]

hello,

My little girl is now 3 weeks old and I have been trying hard to breast feed her. I am really enjoying it when it is going well and I have lots of milk, but it is awful when I try and feed her and nothing seems to come out of my breasts. last night at 8pm I had so much milk she was having a little party as she was feeding and fed for over an hour in total, emptying one breast and then spending about 15 minutes on the next. At her next feeds though (about 10.30pm and 1.30am) there was hardly any milk and she ended up crying through the whole night, with neither of us getting any sleep.

In the end my partner gave her a bottle of formula as she was so distressed.

I really don't know what what to do. I want to breastfeed so much but when I am not satisfying her it feels awful and I am tempted to just move onto bottle feeding ( i don't want to do this though).

Does anyone have any experience of this and offer me advice as to make sure I have enough milk at each feed?

Thanks very much in advance.

Nello, I made the mistake of following my doctor's advice to top up with formula (I'm in Belgium!) and my milk supply has never recovered (6 months in) so persevere! I had some success in re-establishing it by frequent pumping, but it would have been better if I'd just kept BF through the frustrating cluster feeding right from the outset.

I also followed the advice to never wake a sleeping baby and that didn't work for me either - I discovered that I should have been waking her more often to feed. But the advice on here is good - wake her up if she's gone for more than 3 hours in the daytime without feeding.

I wouldn't bother waking her up at night though.

Hi again Nello,
I did have the feeling you weren't in the uk.

Some great advice here, I hope it all helps.

In a nutshell,

feed, feed, feed, feed, feed!

At night time, don't worry about waking her at all, (although you might want to try the "dream feed" and see if it works for you) if she sleeps longer than 3 hours, count your lucky stars and get some sleep yourself!

Oh, the other thing that worked wonders for us in the night time was that I didn't change my DD's nappy after feeds, unless she had done a poo or was really really wet. I was amazed at the difference it made!

You're doing so well!

Your LO is 3 weeks old, right? I'm not an expert, but I'd say you could let her sleep through at night. IMO "night" for a baby can be anything after 8pm. Dream feeds don't work for everyone - we've found that they just disrupt DD's long sleep and she wakes more.

In the day, you don't really want her napping for more than 3 hours as she could get day and night confused, so that's a good time limit. But if it means it's 3.5 hours between feeds, don't stress!

It sounds like your DD is doing well, healthy and gaining weight. So you should be able to let her take the lead on feeds and sleep and your body will then easily adapt to what she needs.

If you want to go out, feed her and then go. I've gotten pretty good at running out of the house! Just be comfortable with the concept that she may want feeding when you're out and try to think of feeding locations beforehand. I feed my DD in the supermarket cafe, sitting on a bench on a dog walk, in the back of the car....

Oh and never use what you can see/express as a guide of how much milk there is. When you get back to ebf, if your LO is putting on weight appropriately and following their centile (look up the WHO breastfeeding infant weight charts if you don't have them) then you know they are getting the right amount of milk.

I was told I could let my baby sleep as long as she wanted to at night! I was hesitant to at first, because she had big weight gain issues, but after these were resolved (at 2-3 weeks), I let her sleep as long as she wanted. (She would do 5 or 6 hours.)

Just hunker down for the crazy evening cluster feeding. I thought it would never end, and suddenly after the 6 week growth spurt, it did!

How are things going today, Nello?