Moving on from breast feeding

[Eminybob]

I had it in my head that I would breastfeed DS for 6 months. Not sure why, I guess because that's nhs recommendation.

Anyway, DS is 16 weeks and I have just been to a weaning talk, where I asked about switching to formula at the same time as starting weaning. The health visitor advised against this as it may be too much and too distressing for so much change at the same time.

I'm in no great hurry to switch, but would like DS fully weaned off the breast before he's 12 months and I go back to work.

So can you please share your experiences with weaning off the breast whist weaning onto solids?
What has worked best, before, after or at the same time.

Thanks in advance.

Anybody?

I am dropping one feed at a time. Milk production started to reduce at about 4 months when the monthly cycles restarted and when that happened I didn't fight it. Baby is 26 weeks today and just do 2 sessions a day now. I have been supplementing with formula milk.

6 months and closer to 12 is massively different. Do you have preferences at which end of the spectrum?

I didn't stop bfing, but I went back to work at 11 months and DD1 was happy with morning, hometime and evening for bfing. And obviously once you get to 12 months give-or-take you could skip formula.

Closer to 6 is more likely to be a process of moving onto bottles of formula.

What I meant really was is it better to switch to formula before weaning, at the same time, or later on?

I mean the start of weaning, not the whole process, so 6 months.

I'd say it is probably easiest to do it once weaning is underway. Just because, at the start of weaning,they aren't eating much. If you keep feeding on demand, you don't need to worry too much about keeping things in balance as they'll naturally make up the calories in milk. Then, once they are naturally accepting more new flavours and drinking a bit less milk, probably becomes easier to swap a feed to a bottle one at a time.

That's a bit of a guess based on friends though. I didn't do it.

My DS is 8 months and has refused all bottles but recently started accepting a soft spout sippy cup for milk - I've just started back at work 2 days a week and he's at nursery on those days.

My milk seems to spoil really quickly so I've been sending ready made formula instead of EBM - he's literally only just started having this having been fully breastfed up to now.

He'll have 2 feeds from me before I drop him off and two feeds when we get home and a 200ml bottle of formula in 2 halves over the course of the day plus solid food and water and he seems quite happy - no additional night wakings, which I had half expected.

I'm thinking of keeping this routine in place on non-nursery days too to gradually wind down breastfeeding. I would like to get down to just two feeds a day and stop completely by 12 months to TTC again.

I decided I wanted to begin to phase out bf when ds was 5 months for various reasons but mostly for my own mental health. This was a couple of weeks before we started weaning. Ds refused all formula and bottles and I had to shelve the idea. He's now been eating solids for about 4 weeks and once he began taking water from a soft spout sippy cup I tried the bottle again and he now takes it no problem.

So a long winded way if saying that in our experience best to wait until weaning is established. But obv all babies are different. Just give something a go and see what happens and don't be too dispondent if it doesn't work initially.

Yes totally agree on the point about weaning - I think they seem to accept formula as just another food stuff.