General advice about BF, please?

[fluffacloud]

Hi

DD 2 is 6.5 months and EBF.

Things have been going fairly well after some initial worries about slow weight gain - 2 to 4oz a week. DD dropped to the 25 percentile but has held her line for the last few months. She is also cutting teeth 2 and 3.

Anyway, questions:

DD is still feeding every 2-3 hours during the day but over the last few weeks has begun to wake every 2-3 hours at night too. I was thinking growth spurt originally but can it last this long?

DD is a totally anti- solids, with the exception of toast. I started with BLW and I'm trying purees and smooth cereals but 2 weeks in I'm getting nowhere. Am I giving her too much milk?

Do I need to give her vitamin drops as she's over 6 months and still BF?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

I'd just keep offering food, but it's all about tastes and textures for the first few months. She'll gradually start to eat meals.

As for the sleep, I'd agree it's probably a phase - my DD is now 18 months and sleep still goes in good and bad phases, though a bad phase now I'd have considered brilliant phase a few months ago so it's a general improvement over time.

Between 6 months and a year it's a gradual process from exclusively milk feeding to, finally by the time she's a year, getting to majority solids with complementary milk. Food off your plate will always look more appealing. Sit together and make it fun and interesting and sociable. Keep relaxed and don't get stressed if she refuses everything you offer. Keep offering lots of different tastes and textures and she will get there eventually.

Vitamins are recommended for breastfed babies once they begin to wean onto solid food and are therefore having less breastmilk. Make sure the ones you choose have vitamin d in them, that's the important one.

My DD was slow to wean onto solids. I would say she was 9/10 months before she ate any real quantity of anything much, other than cereal or toast. I was with her at the GP for something unrelated and mentioned it, but GP said the important thing was that she was able to chew and that if she was able to eat a slice of toast that was all she was bothered about before 1 year. Also she said to just offer her things that we knew she would eat for a couple of weeks and then gradually offer new things one at a time. This worked pretty well and she is now an enthusiastic eater and not at all fussy (aged 2.5 yo) so the limited diet of porridge and toast whilst weaning seems to have done no harm! I bf her to 12 months so she was mainly bf to 10 months or so, before moving to more solids. It was exhausting.

My thanks to you all for the support. It's nice to know that this is a fairly common worry and that I'm not going mad

By the power of posting alone she slept much better last night, only feeding at 7pm, 11pm and 4am - I almost feel human again!