I need help!! Breastfed baby to have formula at dreamfeed!

[Fkak777]

Hi ladies!

I'm currently exclusively breastfeeding my 3 month old baby! He sleep cycle is like this 7pm till 1am until 4 until 7 am but I wanted to put in a dreamfeed at 11pm to try get him to sleep a bit longer... Which maybe is a dream for now! But I wanted to get your advices on the introducing formula and what's best for sleep schedule???

Thank you!!

I tried to do this with my first baby and it made no difference - he still woke at the same times.

Yup - introducing formula will make no difference and you may even find they become more unsettled as the formula is harder to digest.

That's what I'm scared of! Waking up at 11 and no change! Also I feel so attached with the breastfeeding.. I get kind of upset to feed him formula... Maybe it's the hormones!

dreamfeed was a nightmare for us.

If she was hungry she woke up. She wouldn't feed if she wasn't hungry. Trying to dreamfeed woke her up, then she wasn't full enough to settle back without a feed, but wasn't hungry enough to want a feed...

Ended up with a furious, screaming baby for an hour until she'd worked up enough of an appetite to feed and resettle.

Far easier to just feed when she woke. Quick and she settled easy. The feeds did drop to 1 not long after 3 months.

Plus I like to go to bed at 10 if I'm up to feed :). Plus I know people who've dreamfed until nearly 2 because they didn't know if stopping it would mean they woke up later and didn't want to risk it. I found it easier to just let them be guided by hunger signals..

I did this with DS1 who guzzled the bottle in his sleep at 11 and the still woke up at 2am. I then read somewhere that I needed to break sleep at this time because he was effectively sleeping (just like your DC) from 7 -1, then woke up every 3 - 4 hours. The 'break' would then shift those 6 hours from 7 - 1 to 11- 5..
So, I used to turn on the light, change a nappy, then feed. Not fully wake but stirring. He then slept from 11 until 5.15am, result . This then just extended as he got bigger, I just used to splash and dash at 5am!

Tried it with DS2, no chance. Grrrrrrrr

They are all different you can only try different things

Night time breast milk actually have sleepy hormones to help little ones sleep and help you get into a deeper sleep faster. So you may lose quantity of sleep but you have a better quality. Feeding formula only helps babies sleep longer as it takes longer to digest.

As mentioned above most babies have one longer period of sleep and one shorter one so you need to try and switch these. Maybe keeping the room lighter or keep baby downstairs for a nap like sleep with noise around then and then up to bed for the proper sleep when you go?

Dream feed useless. Ds started waking for it earlier and earlier - like 9pm, -so just disrupted my evenings and had no effect on later wakings.

I'm going to say the opposite... 10.30pm formula dream feed worked wonders for us... Saw DS through until about 5am. This was also the way DS learned how to take a bottle.

Whatever you decide, remember it's a phase, and will pass. Weirdly I miss my middle of the night breastfeeds, so cosy.

I think it is baby dependent. My DD didn't really take to a dream feed so just had to wait for her feeds to naturally move, which they did.

With my DS however it's working wonders and he is now sleeping until 630 and he doesn't wake for the dream feed just takes the food!
Unfortunately you won't know if it'll work until you try, which probably isn't a helpful answer for you!

We persevered with the dream feed for months and it didn't work for us. I would dream feed at 10ish and she would still week at midnight. I know other people who swear by it though!

I have a 3 month old with exactly the same schedule and a dream feed with formula did nothing for us, in fact it made him wake more and gave him a pretty unsettled night. I've started just putting his dummy back in when he wakes at 1am and he nods straight back to sleep until 4am so he obviously isn't hungry at that time anyway. Hopefully he eventually stops the 1am wake up....

I don't think the dream feed is working for us either. It seems to have just added another feed. He used to sleep till 1am anyway.

It did get him into a cycle of feeding at 1/4/7ish but last couple of nights that's gone awry.

Don't know whether to continue with it. Been dream feeding for the past 10 days.

Just wanted to come back to this thread and say we are nearly a month into dreamfeeding and it's started to work for us! He's now sleeping through till 4amish (sometimes 3, sometimes 5) and only waking once

Pressed send too soon! Wanted to add stick with it

Also - you can dream feed breastfeeding if you want.

Funny enough I posted before to say it wasn't working but it now is! DS1 now 15 wks and he takes 6 oz of formula at 11pm which sees him through to about 4am. I feed him around 4.30/5am and then he goes back down until about 7.30am. It provably didn't work before cos he took so little but he guzzles almost the whole of one of those Aptamil bottles (small one)

Heather - all your posts sound exactly like me and my boy!

Dreamfeed worked brilliantly for us (up to 6 months-then all went to pot!). We did a f dreamfeed whenever we went to bed, usually 10ish and he'd sleep through till 6. He was mix fed anyway though so f wasn't an entirely new thing.

Twinklestar2 you're not in Edinburgh too are you?! Lol....

Lol heatherbell