Decided to try to BF past 6 months but have a few questions re maintaining supply and mixed feeding

[abigboydidit]

Hi, I fed DS (now 24 months) until after I fell pregnant with DD (5 months) but have been struggling to enjoy BFing DD and considering giving up. In brief, she's a very messy/fussy feeder (so hard to feed she out and about) and in addition to this I find I am restricting the places I take the children to because of the safety issues of having a toddler running riot while I am feeding DD. For example, we live near the beach so I took the kids there on Friday but DD did this thing she does where she gets all wound up and screams between trying to latch on and waiting for letdown and the only way to feed her is to get my boob out and then gently rock her at waist level until she calms down then quickly bring her onto me. Not discreet feeding in any way. No sooner had I finally started to feed her when DS decided to keep running towards the water, as if it was a great game...

Anyway, DD won't feed in a sling but will happily take a bottle. She currently has 4 breast feeds during the day, a bottle of EBM at bedtime and no night feeds. I express for the bottle 1st thing on waking from one side, so she then feeds from both sides about half and hour to an hour later. I was expressing after her bottle at night but was getting so little I don't think I will do so for any longer.

So, my questions are - is 4 feeds a day sustainable? With DS he only had 2 from 9 months when I returned to work (morning and bedtime) but had 5 feeds until 6/7 months. And, at the risk of sounding stupid - how does mixed feeding work? I like the idea of giving a bottle of formula when we are out and about as I really hate expressing so wouldn't want to have to do enough for more than 1 bottle per day. This wouldn't be every day though so would I need to pick a feed to drop and replace with formula full time (so to speak)? Or if I start giving bottles and skipping feeds willy nilly do I risk getting mastitis or wrecking my supply.

I really do want to try to keep going with BFing so am hoping I don't have to go for all or nothing. Thanks again and sorry for rambling!

in my case dd only dropped to 4 feeds a day once fully weaned (ie having meat fish etc not just veg). I have heard of babies on just 4 feeds prior to weaning but they tend to be ff. I'm sure there are exceptions though!

on the mixed feeding, I do the odd formula bottle in place of a feed, it means my boobs are a bit overly full for the rest of the day but doesn't seem to muck up supply. I guess it depends how often you do it - if you did a ff most days I guess your supply might drop.

Thanks for the reply. She still gets 5 feeds but because of the carnage of bedtime with her and a 2 year old, her last feed is EBM. So technically as am expressing, I am doing 5 feeds sort of