Combination feeding

[fiorentina]

My 3 week old baby wouldn't breastfeed, despite finally getting a tongue tie snipped last week, he now seems too used to bottle feeding and I have been expressing every 3 hours since my milk came in, occasionally topping up, but usually 100% breastmilk. If possible I'd like to combination feed, so that I am not constantly expressing and have a bit more freedom to go out for more than a couple of hours without having to worry about expressing. I am keen to avoid my milk supply drying up too quickly if I do this, as I'd like him to have at least some breastmilk until 6/8 weeks if possible.

Any tips on how I can achieve this please? I can find lots of advice on moving from breastfeeding to formula but not sure about expressing to combined feeding. Thanks very much.

Hello! I'm exclusively pumping too, babe is 9 weeks today. Congrats on getting this far, it is SUCH hard work.

I found I was naturally dropping pumping sessions as he has reflux and feeds would merge together and I just didn't have time to pump if I wanted to eat or wash or go to the loo!

So I'm now down to 4 sessions a day - at approx 3am, 8am, 3pm and 8pm (I go to bed at 9 as we are doing shifts on the sofa). I'm still freezing a bit here and there, so producing plenty to keep him 100% EBM at the moment.

I am starting to introduce formula though, so we can go out for longer periods and I can slowly stop all together (it is affecting my blood sugars and making me ill).

So I don't have much advice, I found dropping down to 4 pumps a day quite natural and easy. I'm now a bit stuck as I want to tail off slowly, and am finding it hard to cut out a session as I get so hard and painful. I'd like to cut out the 3am pump first!

Oh, I think someone on here linked me to this: www.kellymom.com/bf/weaning/weaning-from-pump.html

Thank you

I'd carry on working on bfing. DD and I didn't crack it till around 3 weeks old and we started trying properly (no TT) at day 4. It is soooo much easier now (DD 4 months and ebf) and she hasn't had top-ups since about week 5.

If you introduce formula, you are still risking your supply. And your body adjusts to when to produce the milk, so you would have to work out which pumping session you would like to drop so that you could go out then. You couldn't skip the 3pm pump one day and the 9pm another iyswim.