Bedtime bottle? Feeling torn!

[fluffandnonsense]

My DD is 2 weeks old today and I'm EBF. So far she has had no formula but has had to have a few bottles of expressed milk due to me being very ill after her birth.

At the moment she simply won't settle at night. Last night she went down for a grand total of 1.5 hours from midnight to 8am. I'm awake the whole time as she squirms and is generally unsettled/on and off the boob.

My DH is more than happy to do a night feed for be but I'm struggling to express enough milk for it to be worthwhile. I'm really debating introducing a bottle if formula at around midnight just to allow me a few hours sleep. As of next week my DH will be back at work and I will need to be up and awake at 8am to look after my 2.5 year old as well as the baby. I'm dreading it!!

I really didn't want her to have formula and I feel quite torn that I'm even thinking about it but I'm starting to feel desperate. Will I totally cock up all my hard work if I do??

Have you looked into why your dd may be so unsettled fluff?
Recently found our our DS is tongue tied which is why we're having trouble feeding. We have had to resort to formula as he just wasn't getting enough milk but hopefully will get TT sorted this week and go back to ebf. Have a look at the Milk Matters website, particularly the tongue tie section (sorry can't link from phone) it's very enlightening.
HTH

By the way DS is 3 weeks on Friday

Up until the last few days she had been very settled going 3/4 hours between feeds during the day and around 2 hourly at night. A midwife did check in hospital for TT and said she was ok. She's putting weight on well too and was back up to her birth weight by day 10 after only losing 7oz.

She seems frustrated and fussy at the breast suddenly whereas she was quite settled with even 5 minutes of feeding a few days ago

Can you get to a bf support group? They can observe a feed and give you some ideas. Sounds very hard work but it will pass. You could try safe co sleeping and evening cluster feeding to help?

Just a thought- if you've been expressinga lot so early on you could have encouraged a slight oversupply which she is finding hard to cope with? A bf support person would help you work out if this is the case.