thinking of giving a formula top up at 10pm feed tonight

[pipoca]

DD is 9 weeks old and ebf. She sleeps 10pm ish til 3am ish and then feeds again at 6am ish but doesn't settle again for hours and I'm so tired and have a 3 yr old to look after and no childcare from next month in 40 degree heat (we live abroad). Getting a bit desperate for DD to drop a feed so thinking of trying to fill her up with formula tonight and see if she'll sleep longer.
Don't know why I'm posting really...just needed to vent. I know you'll all tell me it's pointless and she'll wake anyway and I'll have boobs like over ripre melons.
sigh.

Evelyn, I don't like definite claims, either - which is why I picked cheria up on her statements which I'm glad to see she has modified :)

OP - no one can give you any guarentees either way. You have to make up your own mind. Happily, there is some decent evidence to help you, which you can then use alongside your own knowledge of your own situation.

cheria it wasn't my link, but out of interest, how would you define a "neutral" site? Obviously Kelly is a lactation consultant and supports BFing but I don't really know where I'd find a link that didn't have some kind of bias - either to supporting BFing or supporting FF, because without an interest in this one way or another, a person isn't going to write anything or do a study.

Doesn't mean that the interest automatically makes it flawed though. But in order to try to offer the best advice or information to people I would be really interested in what you'd think was neutral?

OP try it, it might work

good luck

marwoir I think this may give you useful info:

drjaygordon.com/pediatricks/startingout/supplement.html

it includes links/references to the actual studies into the science of virgin gut if you really want to read them :)

organiccarrotcake I am not sure they exist. I think you have to search yourself and take information from a variety of sites from both sides of the debate.

The reason I mentioned Kelly as not being neutral is that her links were exclusively to sites which back up her opinion, and some of them are so in your face that to someone having difficulties it would make things worse.

When I was going through a major guilt trip about, first, the milk not coming in and supplementing until it did (it did, and I bf), and then, a few weeks later having been hospitalised 2 weeks away from DD and on meds and on ventilators and having surgery, so unable even to express my milk in one boob dried up, I tried and tried to find information which woudl lift off some of the guilt of, when I got home, giving her a little amount of breast milk, and mainly formula feeds (she had of course been ff during my stay at the hospital, but latched back on as if nothing had ever happened, but it ran out after a few days!)

And in fact online there isn't much. So I called several independent midwives and had a couple of visits to a paediatrician to discuss the risks in detail. And what all of them came back with was that yes, breast is best, but formula is the next best thing. It isn't poison, if prepared correctly it isn't harmful, and the pressure on women to conform to the exclusive breastfeeding idea is dangerous to the woman (added stress, even PND). And the mother is as important as the child, and shouldn't have to feel beaten up over everything she does.

So as far as the OP is concerned, I wouldn't worry about supplementing or replacing one feed with FF, as it is very very unlikely that any harm will be done, so she shouldn't feel guilty if that's what she chooses to try in order to get a better night's sleep.

Erm, I shoudl have put this in a PM. But having been through the guilt I just don't want anyone else to have to go through it too, coz it's horrible.

Oh, and as far as anything medical is concerned, there is rarely balanced info, as someone has to fund all studies, and they all start out with preconceived ideas or bias...as we all do

I'm not too worried about the whole just one bottle/virgin gut as she had a bottle of formula in hospital at 2 days old so there's no point worrying about that and she's had a tiny bit since in desperation.
I'm going to try a bottle of formula at 10pm instead of a bf and see what happens. If she wakes at 3am regardless well then I'll just go back to ebf as it's less hassle than fully ff. I'd just like a bit more sleep, otherwise bf is going OK. Thanks for all the links.

cheria glad you got sorted in the end, and of course you're right to be sensitive about women feeling under pressure to excl bf.

But you are wrong about everything being 'biased' - at least, in the way you mean.

Science starts with a hypothesis. The hypothesis might be biased towards plausibility. So I don't think I will get funding for exploring the hypothesis that crossing your fingers and running three times backwards round the garden will make a difference to infant health. But exploring the hypothesis that breastfeeding for a certain time makes a difference to infant health is at least plausible - then you need to ensure your data is correct and correctly assessed and so on. That's not a 'bias' in an ideological sense.

The main reason for you not being able to find information that alleviated your guilt is that you were looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong place.

Guilt is not justified anyway - reserve it for reactions to things that you do wrong deliberately and knowingly!

But (I think) you were looking for something that tells you 'formula has no risks and it does not matter how babies are fed, and here is a scientific paper that tells you this'. The reason you could not find something is not because of some conspiracy of silence, or bias ( how would that work? Bias from the institutions and individuals who stand to make ££££££ out of breastfeeding? ). You couldnt find it because there is nothing scientific that could tell you that.

So you had to ask people like midwives and doctors for reassurance and they told you what you wanted to hear., and what they believed.

That doesn't mean what they said was wrong. It's perfectly true that formula isn't poison; perfectly true it needs to be prepared correctly (though nothing will make it 100 per cent harmless in that purist sense); perfectly true that mothers should not feel criticised and beaten up for using it.

But it doesn't change the biological facts!

cheria what an awful experience for you :(

It is very hard to interpret studies and often the summaries are tough to untangle as well. "Significant" is a statistical term, for instance, so for something to be statistically significant doesn't mean it's what we might consider to be a "significant" risk (although it might). Risk is very personal anyway...

I totally agree that no one should ever feel guilty about their choices, and even less so about when they don't have a choice. I do believe, though, that people should have the best information they can to make the best decision they can.

Kellymom's pretty good really, to be fair. She's as highly qualified as it is possible to be as a lactation supporter and therefore what she writes isn't her opinion, but a summary of the research as we understand it now. Having said that, some of her links are to research, and others are to articles. While I trust Kelly, I wouldn't necessarily take any of the articles she links to as necessarily being accurate unless I knew the writer - only because no matter where the reference comes from I want some reassurance that the writer knows what they're talking about.

Formula is a life-saving miracle product, of that there is no doubt. I hate the phrase "it's not poison" because it implies that someone has said it is. But made up correctly or otherwise the use of it DOES have risks. For you, it was a toss-up between formula or starvation for your baby. Hardly a difficult decision. In that case the risks of formula V BF are irrelevant and thank goodness that formula was there for you. When the decision isn't as stark as that there are other elements to consider. Sleep deprivation is absolutely dreadful. While formula isn't a magic bullet, some people find it helps. There are downsides to babies sleeping longer/deeper anyway and this might be a consideration, amongst many other things, such as the risk to the baby of mum falling asleep while caring for him/driving/etc. But ultimately it's the parents' decision and I feel it's quite unfair for parents to not have the full story before making their choices.

Sounds like a good idea OP .I hope it works out for you and you get some sleep

Sorry TT, cross post.

OP I think you're making logical decisions (for what its worth) and hope something works out for you and your baby elephant .

Actually, just one more thing to suggest - a personal experience which totally took me and DH by surprise. DH has been snoring a lot recently and I've been kicking him out into the spare room. One night both DS2 (who we bedshare with) and DH were both at it (like father, like son) and so I gave up and headed into the spare room alone. For the first time ever (DS is 1) he slept through his 3am feed. He woke and wriggled around a bit, but didn't cry, and he just crashed on DH's tummy and went back to sleep.

I was quite surprised, and since then when I've really needed the sleep I leave them together and head off on my own! If I'm there he figures the milk bar is open and he's going to crack on regardless but he seems to cope fine without it.

Don't know your position but it's just a thought, if you have a partner who could sleep through the elephant noise anyway .

soooo....total disaster.

She was very windy at the feed before the 1030pm formula one but had gone off to sleep in the end. So I feed her and she takes 120ml and goes on one breast for a bit before falling asleep at about 1120.

DS (3.4 yo) falls out of bed at 1230 and starts wailing...I'm still awake at this stage. DD wakes 4.30, I wake in a pool of milk from the boob she didn't feed from. Her crying wakes DS. Get him back to bed. bf DD, she starts screaming and screaming like a banshee with trapped wind so we end up down stairs with her in the pram so I can keep the dummy wedged in and finally get her settled at 6am, I sleep on sofa and DS wakes at 6.44.

I don't know whether the formula exaserbated the wind, but it certainly didn't make her sleep thru so I think it's back to the drawing board.

thanks for the suggestion organiccarrotcake but she's not in our room anyway, she's in her own room so I'm not disturbed by the trumpeting, I go in to feed her (there's a bed in there). You say your DS is 1 and has a 3am feed...that's what worries me. I'm self employed and need to be working again by end september and not sure how I'll do it on 5 hours broken sleep a night...I'm not good on little sleep.

pipoca I'm in the same position (being self employed) and it's really tough. For me I get through by co-sleeping, but when that's not an option I understand it's just the pits :( To be fair to my DS2, it's just who he is, rather than what we've done. DS1 was sleeping 7-7 with no feeds from 3 months old (EBF, not a drop of anything else passed his lips until over 4 months). I wouldn't panic at this stage that she'll be night feeding for that long. She may, she may not.

I know you weren't able to sleep in the same room as her but I'd just wondered if your OH could bear it to give you a break... maybe on a weekend? Just a thought but I can see it's unlikely to be the solution.

It's so hard when she's so little. Are you going back full time? Is there any chance that you could express one night feed for someone else to do a few nights a week?

I'm afraid I'm not full of sleepy advice further than co-sleeping, yet I'm totally understanding of trying to look after other kids and also work when you're knackered :(

But the problem is if I'm bfing then if she wakes during the night it doesn't matter who sleeps where, I still have to get up to feed her.

I work from home so it's flexible in some ways but also means I often have to stay up late, work most of the night and I'm worried about that if she's still waking.

It's not that I want to stop bf particularly, it's much less faff than ff (DS was mix fed from birth and on formula full time from 8 weeks...altho didn't drop that 2am feed til 14 week. I thought that's cos he was a small 36 weeker so took longer). It's far preferable to bf at 3am than ff and it's great the rest of the time, just whip out the boob. I just worry this night waking will go on and on and wondered if it might not if she were having at least some formula.

But based on last night I'd be better getting up at 3am, quick feed and back to bed for an hour or two than the screamathon we had last night. Not that it was necessarily formula, maybe just a coincidence and a bad night generally, she was windy before the formula feed.

This too shall pass, right?

I suppose I've had false hopes from the start as my mum's always going on about how both me and my brother dropped the 2am feed by 6 weeks (ff from about 5 weeks and 3 weeks) and my friend's baby (ff) did from 5 weeks. DS didn't drop it til 14 weeks but was small for dates and born at 36 weeks, so I assumed that was why. He was on formula from 8 weeks, mix fed before that.
DD was a decent size at birth at 38 weeks and is a good feeder and quite quickly did 10pm til 3am so I suppose I thought she'd lengthen that out. I know it's early days and it's better than a lot of people, just for me, personally I find it hard and am worried about the return to work.
will stop rambling now.

pipoca The (obviously not going to work) idea of her staying in bed with your OH was only because I've found that my DS actually didn't wake when I wasn't there, but he was with someone (I guess he figured there was no point!). However, when I said it I'd not realised how small your small is. Sorry.

At this stage there's probably little or nothing you can do to affect their night waking and just making the going to sleep part of it as fast as possible is probably the only solution. I wish there was a magic bullet :( but really it's just a time thing. They have needs, we fulfil them and we get exhausted in the process. But of course, as you say, it will pass. And probably faster than you expect.

Hello pip my DS is 11 weeks and I am patiently waiting for him to start dropping feeds .

Every night for him seems to be different! I give him the occasional ff, which makes jeff all difference to how long he sleeps. I have tried dreamfeeding, which again was pretty hit and miss.

What I am learning, fast, is that he'll start dropping feeds when he's good and ready. Some nights he'll go from 7pm-11pm or sometimes 1am, then a 3am feed, then up at about 6am. Last night he went 7-10:30 (he had a ff at 7!), then up at 3am and sleep through to 6am, then didn't want to get up until 7:45am!

Don't tell my DH, but I don't think he'll start sleeping through until he's in his own room. But as he sleeps on his tummy (yes, I know the risks), we won't move him out until he's rolling proficiently. And I am lucky that he can get up, feed and be back down in 15 mins. But I also struggle to nod off again myself...which is flipping frustrating as I'm knackered.

I hope that your DD finds her rhythem qucikly for you.

That should've read rhythm

pipoca, sounds like a nightmare, so sorry! What's her sleeping pattern like during the day? I'm finding the afternoon naps make a huge difference as to whether our DS wakes up at 1.30 in the morning or sleeps through from 8pm to 3.30am. (But haven't discovered the magic routine yet!) Am sure you've explored this already but just a thought.
And thank you to others for the links on supplementing. Good to know, and (without wanting to hijack), I think it's the word 'risk' that's so emotionally loaded with reference to the virgin gut - especially when some (SOME) of the evidence cited in these articles is purely anecdotal. This writer www.breastfeed.com/pumping-bottle-feeding/bottle/risks-of-formula-feeding, talking about her daughter receiving supplements says 'had the hospital nurses inadvertently done some kind of damage to her? Had I? What was going on inside my little girl? I wasn't sure' (my itals)
If there was any long lasting damage to her daughter, she doesn't mention it (and her daughter is now a grown up). So it may make for a more dramatic writing style, but not exactly well thought through medical advice.
And I'm not sure that the antibiotics I had to take for mastitis didn't do more damage to my poor boy's digestive system.

Argh, sorry, I am hijacking - this is why I lurk usually!
Appreciate the links and all the brilliant advice I have gleaned from the likes of tiktok on breastfeeding on these threads, it's definitely helped us soldier on. But it feels a bit like using the word 'risk' in the context of the virgin gut is like a red flag for anyone already on high alert for possible things to feel guilty about (and I include myself in that category!)
Going away now...sorry again.

You certainly raise an important point, marwoir. To clarify, the virgin gut isn't a theory - it's a proven syense fakt. While some of the effects of introducing things other than BM to the immature gut are understood, others aren't. For instance, we know that anything other than BM flushes out the coating on the gut which can allow bacteria or viruses to cross the gut wall, causing gastroenteritis. Forget the virgin gut - this is a well known risk of FF and the virgin gut is just an explanation of one of the reasons why FFing increases the chances of a baby getting gastro illnesses.

What word do you think would be better than "risk"? I am always trying to "watch my language" and improve how I put across information. I hate it, hate it, hate it when something upsets someone :(

BTW Re antibiotics - certainly they can upset a baby's stomach when taken by proxy. However, this is where the balance of risk comes in. You becoming ill with serious mastitis/potential abscess etc - risk to your bub (never mind you!!) would be higher than the risk of the antis. Balancing risks is something we all do all day. I'm just about to load DS2 into the car to do a home visit to a BFing mum. Should I put my DS's safety before the mum who needs help and not put him in the car?

I'm not being flippant or melodramatic, just trying to come up with an example as I rush out the door, so it's just a bad example :) Trying to say that to me, the word "risk" isn't a bad word. It's just a factual thing we all have to do, all the time, and it's important for me to have all the info to make those daily decisions. Sometimes statistics don't help though. I know how many people die on the roads each day but it's hard to know how that relates to oneself. Esp as I lost my BIL in a car accident :(

I'm not fond of the 'virgin gut theory' myself, because the very term sounds purist and judgmental :)

The science behind it is uncontroversial, though. We know for a fact that anything you put into a baby's digestive system has an effect. We know the effect of foreign proteins on the infant gut wall. We know the systemic effect of this. What we can't (ever) know is the possible short or long-term impact on health in individual babies, bar the few extremely sensitive babies who cannot tolerate any formula .

What is often not really emphasised is that the systemic effect, for most infants, is likely to be temporary because breastfeeding acts as a 'repair'. Some of the health impact may remain in a few susceptible babies.

It worries me that mothers may look back on the odd bottle of formula their babies may have been given and become anxious about their baby's 'virgin gut' because however sure the science of it, it is not worth anxiety or (heaven help us) guilt. Truly exclusive breastfeeding for 6 mths with nothing else is vanishingly rare in the whole world - in just about every culture and society babies get other foods at some point, often for cultural/religious reasons, and these other foods may well be animal milks. This is not a good thing, but at least it's not a terribly unusual thing, and no individual mother needs to feel she is falling short in some way compared to the vast majority of other mothers :)

I agree that when you are talking about 'risks' it seems to be an emotive term for many people, however as organiccc said when you are talking about scientific research etc it is quite hard to rephrase.

The fact is there are risks to using formula, I personally feel that all women should make their own informed decision, and withholding some information as it might upset people is taking away the right to make an informed choice.

If I may use an example from my personal experience, to explain better. When my daughter was 2 she had to undergo some surgery to her brain/skull, it was a fairly straightforward proceedure, and I was relatively calm about it all. The night before the op the surgeon came with the consent forms, and proceeded to go through all the possible risks of the op (death, bleeding on the brain, meningitis etc), I then had to weigh up all these possible risks against the need for the op, I signed the forms. I was a complete mess after that, what if the op went wrong? What if I had backed out? I would much rather have not had to think about the risks of the surgery, however I realised it was the surgeons duty to inform us that there were risks involved. I would have been furious if I was told there were no risks involved, then something had gone wrong, even if the risks were very unlikely and the majority of children having this operation were absolutely fine.

marwoir she's very good during the day, feeds and sleeps, goes about 3 or 4 hours between feeds, has spells of being awake.
I've been thinking about it and I think she's just obviously not ready to drop a feed and bf during the night is the easiest thing so I'm going to put up and shut up for now.
Thanks