Mixing pre made formula and expressed milk

[Kazmog]

Hello, I have been ebf my 15 week old but will be returning to work soon (part time)?and will be difficult to express whilst there. A friend suggested that I gently introduce some formula on her 7pm feed. I wondered if I could buy some pre made cartons of milk and mix this with some breast milk? This mean I would still be able able to give a 80 percent breast milk diet. I can't see a reason why this wouldn't work and not be harmful but wanted to double check thx x

It should be fine, I've had to do this (granted DS is older than your LO). But it works for us at the moment. You can mix the formula and breastmilk together in the same bottle and reduced it until she gets used to the taste or you could just try her with it and see how she goes. I'd give it to her the same way you give her EBM in a bottle so she's sort of used to the set up.

Also her poo might change a little bit just so you know.

The is nothing wrong with mixing ebm & ready to feed formula (powdered would have to be made separately and then mixed).

The only problem would be if you mixed, for instance, 3oz of ebm with 3oz of rtf formula to make a 6oz bottle but baby only took 2oz (quite possible - some bf babies will only take the bare minimum they need until mum gets home).

You would then have to throw the ebm/formula mix out at the end of the feed (I just checked on Aptamil's website here) and would have wasted ebm (also the greater the amount of bm in a baby's diet the greater benefits to baby). If the bottle was just ebm then it could have been kept/fed to baby for up to 6 hours

You may find baby will wait for you, or will eat as normal, but formula doesn't need to be introduced until baby actually needs it (DD3 never had formula until I was in hospital and unable to feed her due to the amount of pain I was in - Paeds A&E got her a bottle and she drank it just fine and that was at 6m).

Much like the more bm a baby has the better for them it is, the longer a baby is exclusively bf the greater the benefits to baby are.

HTH

Thank you both so much that is really helpful xx