Baby not gaining enough weight...advice please!

[TeaBaggy]

I have a little boy who is 10weeks old. until now i have been exclusively breastfeeding, sort of on demand but not letting him go more than 3 hours without a feed except at night. his weight gain has never been as good as hv would like and has gained an average of 3-5ounces a week. i feed him from both breasts at each feed and AM NOT dieting/restricting my calories. i didnt have him weighed last week cos he was a bit poorly (chesty cough, bit miserable but no temperature) so we stayed home in the warm apart from to go for his first lot of jabs (which made him even more unsettled).

anyway today i go to get him weighed (for the first time without dp, so feeling a bit nervous) and he weighs the same as he did a fortnight ago. hv asks me if im dieting, i say no but he has been a bit poorly. she tells me (again) to up my calories. she weighed him twice, which he didnt like, started crying while i was talking to her/getting him dressed. she said she thought he sounded like he was crying cos he was hungry (i told her id fed him only an hour before). then she asked if i would feed him so she could watch as he has now dropped from 75th c at birth to being on the 9th c so she is quite concerned. i tried to feed him but he was still crying and wouldnt latch on or settle, she tutted and said it was because he was getting fustrated by sucking and not getting any milk, and was it usually like this (its not). in the end she arranged for a hv to come see us on friday to make sure he is putting on weight cos if not "we will have to do something about it".

i had to take off my wrap id carried him there in to feed him and had to put him down to put it back on. he screamed blue murder the whole 20mins i was there and i left feeling like a total failure with what seemed like the whole room watching me unable to calm him.

i have been out and bought some formula in my despair and he has had 3 formula feeds and 2 from me since lunchtime as i really want him to put on weight. I really wanted to breastfeed until at least 6months ish and now dont no what to do as his weight gain has never been on track and i cant help wondering if he would be better off being bottle fed from now on. i have no idea how to to combi feed temporarily (if that is even possible) without making my milk supply drop.

all advice is really appreciated. sorry for the long post, didnt want to drip

Forgot to mention that she was always full after a breastfeed so the need to top up with formula was irrelevent IMO.

well so far today i have tried to breastfeed and just given him a small formula feed, which he guzzled down. i really just want him to have put on some weight tomorrow so they will get off my case a little bit as i hate confrontation with ppl i dont know. will maybe try to express again to get my supply up as im worried he isnt getting enough from just me. then hopefully i can go back to ebf.

thanks to everyone for all the advice. its so hard to know if what youre doing is right and there are so many dif opinions so i will try and go with my instincts more. really want to cancel tomorrows visit to take the pressure off and give me more time to get some proper advice but dp thinks i shudnt cancel. i guess i can always ignore what they say...

fingers crossed he has put on some weight

Totally understand your need to have him weighed, teabaggy. Can you attend with a question in your mind - 'I have been doing some reading, and I'm a bit worried as you told me quite clearly that my own calorie intake has an effect on his breastmilk intake...can you tell me where you have seen this, as all my reading indicates it doesn't? I'd rather feed more often, and supplement him with expressed breastmilk, and get more calories into him that way - what do you think?'

Do you reckon you could do this???:)

I think a good question to have in mind is 'would I have been worried about him if I haven't had him weighed?'
If the answer is no (becasue he seems alert, developing normally etc), then I really wouldn't worry about weight unless he's actually losing weight.
I do appreciate that it's hard not to worry though - I surprised myself by feeling a bit worried and upset when my DS dropped from just below 75th to just above 50th which is daft! I think we should weigh them as infrequently as possible!

well the good news is that he has put on 4ounces in 2 days! so she was really pleased with him. and he was the perfect baby showing off while she was here...smiling and cooing at her and kicking his legs while holding his rattle in both hands so she didnt even ask me if he was alert and developing well...

sorry tiktok, but it wasnt the same hv and im a chicken so i didnt ask your question. i will ask her next time i see her if she says it again.

the plan now is to go back to not worrying and carrying on as normal at least until we get him weighed again next week.

massive thanks to everyone for their help and advice.

That's good news, teabaggy.

It's hard to be assertive and not chicken, I know. I have loads of things still in my head that I could have said/wish I'd said to various HCPs about pregnancy, labour, birth and feeding :)

(I mean....I would love to have contradicted the midwife who told me to lie back flat in second stage 'or you will squash the baby's head on the way out', but being in second stage, I was too busy to argue. Grrrrr. )

Pleased things are working out teabaggy hope you only get nice HV's from now on.

tiktok I am happy to stand corrected, I am by no means a bf-ing expert.

I sympathise DD was a 1-3oz gainer but started at 25th centile so couldn't fall through loads. If you feel like they're pushing for FF tops up, then I had the strategy that I would ask for a pead referral (distrusting HVs and GPs on BF matters) as they always seemed for more likely to assess the whole baby and not the weight gain. Also means if they say it's fine then you can shove that in the HVs face politely inform HV there are no other worries. We moved to the US at 3 months and there you see a pead. anyway and he never mentioned her weight even when she got to 0.4th centile as she was clearly a handfulfine.