Anybody mixed feeding?

[PurpleDana]

Ladies, Are any of u mixed feeding? I don't know anything about it but would like to know more. How do u do it? How's it going? My dd suffers terribly with trapped wind, especially in the evening. She is now pulling off the breast in pain during feeds. She has a bottle of expressed milk in the night which she seems to take comfortably & settle easier afterwards. So, I'm thinking about mixing expressed feeds & formula feeds, ff cos I can't express enough at the moment. Your stories & advice would be really helpful :-)

I am doing mix feeding but my wee ones only 5 days old so its early days. She was to tired from the drugs i had in labour to feed straight away at the breast she started on day 3 when my milk came I am gradually trying to reduce her formula down to one feed at night. She is Jaundice atm so it going slow but I am expressing when she cant managed the boob. I am hoping to get her 75/25 breast fed with a ff at night when she is too tired and I am too!!

Let me know how you get on :D

Hi I am doing mix of breast, expressed bottles (2 a day) and formula (2 a day) because my six week old just can't get full on my breast. It works well for us, the challenge is pumping at the right time to get as much as possible, usually at the same time as a bottle feed.
Mine seems fine with this, though definitely settles better after formula! We introduced bottle at about 2 weeks with no problem.

Were mixed feeding in probably an odd fashion, our 20 w/o has regular formula bottles (at 10am, 1pm and 4 pm) through the day - she is breast fed to sleep at night, has little breast feeds / suckles to sleep for most of her day time naps and is on the boob over night if she wakes. She doesn't stay awake longer than 2-2.5hrs so if a bottle and breast feed clash she'll get breast fed. It's not for everyone and does feel like I'm constantly feeding her but it works well for us.

I only have partial supply so find it easier to bottle feed in the day when I'm awake rather than at night!

It's so good to hear what people do there is so little advice on mix feeding

We mix feed DD (23 weeks). We introduced a bottle of EBM from 3 weeks but I never expressed more than about 4oz and she always faffed on the bottle. We introduced formula at 4 months instead which she takes really well. I BF in the day (and overnight if needed) but she has a FF about 5.30, bath, then more formula before BF to settle. I am looking at cutting down the BF at 6 months so may well make one of the day time feeds (? Mid morning) formula as well).

Hi, I'm fully FF now but have mixed fed all three of my DC - they were predominantly breastfed but offered a bottle of formula at bedtime (c 7pm). I found this worked really well because my milk supply was naturally lower at that time, so no need to express, and I successfully did all other feeds as breast. Occasionally (ie during growth spurts if they'd cluster fed and cluster fed and cluster fed for hours) I'd give an extra bottle, but in the main it was just that one FF per day.

With DS1 and DS2 I did this until 6m, when I gradually replaced one BF per week with a FF - by 7m both were fully FF.

DS3, now 8m, was a lot more distractible with daytime breastfeeds than his big brothers (probably because there was just too much excitement going on having big brothers ) so with him, i replaced a couple of daytime breastfeeds with formula earlier than I did with the older two. So by 6m he was really just having morning and dreamfeed breastfeeds, plus any other feeds in the night (he fed in the night longer than either of the other two too!). But it still worked really well.

I think the key is, if you plan to replace one or more breastfeeds with formula, do it gradually (i.e. drop one BF per week) if you want to avoid engorgement/mastitis. For me the evening bottle wasn't an issue because I was naturally lower in milk at that time anyway. But when I moved some of DS3's daytime milk feeds to formula, I made sure I stopped the breastfeed gradually, taking 6-7 before dropping it completely.

HTH

sorry that should read 6-7 days!

Thanks ladies.
We decided to switch mostly to the bottle and I will keep expressing, so we will be mixing breast milk in with the formula for each feed.
Began yesterday evening and so far so good, she's like a different baby! So settled & content. The problems with wind were obviously due to a bad latch, which makes me a little reluctant to breast feed a couple of times a day which I did consider.
Also noticed not breast feeding every 2hrs made expressing so much easier! Got 3oz in 10mins easily, which means I can maybe make the ratio of breastmilk-formula a bit more even if I want to :-)