Cutting down breastfeeds as returning to work

[dldl]

Hi Ladies,

Looking for some advice here. Never been on this specific forum before and just spent my morning browsing it - wow!

I have been exclusively breastfeeding for 4 months now, and am going back to work in a few weeks' time. Expressing at work is not an option unfortunately. Have finally managed to get DS to take a bottle of expressed milk when he's hungry which has been a major achievement (and expense trying all the bottles)! I am now wondering how I go about cutting down the feeds so that I am not in agony whilst at work! I would like to continue giving a morning and evening feed when I do go back though.

Does anyone have any suggestions? At the moment I am feeding at about 6:30am, 10am, lunchtime, mid-afternoon, early evening and bedtime. Occasionally 1 feed at night if he doesn't sleep through. So on average 6 - 7 times a day. There are random days where DS wants to be permanently attached to the breast, but let's forget about those for the meantime!

I was wondering. Do I express straight after the 6:30am feed and then skip the 10am feed to begin with for a week and then body gets used to not feeding at 10am, and then repeat that with expressing with the lunchtime feed and not giving the mid-afternoon feed for a week? Will this work? Have I made any sense? So in 2 weeks time I will be feeding and expressing at 6:30am, giving bottle at 10am, feeding and expressing at lunchtime, giving bottle mid-afternoon, feeding in early evening and bedtime. And then how do I move forward from there?

Thanks in advance for the help and advice and please do let me know if I've totally lost the plot and got it all wrong!

I wouldn't bother with expressing if you want to cut down! Do you plan to stop completely, or will you still feed morning and evening?

I think the best way is to cut out a feed at a time, every few days, and replace it with the milk you are going to feed him once you're back at work - you can probably keep on with morning and evening feeds too, if you want to. When I went back DS was 7 months and I expressed once a day at the time he would have the bottle of expressed milk, but if I didn't get enough, he would have a bottle of formula instead for that one feed. Then he more than made up for me being at work when I got home!