Combination feeding

[April52]

Does anyone have any advice on a good way to combine breast and formula feeding? I've struggled to satisfy my DS during the day as he has, from just a few weeks old, slept 6-8 hours overnight. I have tried to get him to dream feed in order to balance out the day/night feeding pattern but he is too sleepy to take very much. It's been a struggle as I'm pretty much feeding him every 1 to 1 1/2 hrs during the day and there's no time to spend with my older child (i posted a few weeks ago about this as i was in crisis then!) in addition to the fact that baby DS can't seem to get enough down him to nap well in the day. It means I worry as he isn't getting close to 15 hrs sleep (more like 11) and after about 10am every day he just can't settle. I have resorted to a bottle of formula to settle him which has worked and was great as he smiled and played with us for a while rather than just feeding and sleeping during the day! He's 7 weeks and I want to get him past his 8 wk injections but after will introduce a couple of bottles of formula a day in the hopes I can combine feed till weaning.

Does this sound doable? Has anyone else done this? Or am I setting myself up to fail and say goodbye to breastfeeding?

I've been mix feeding since 8 weeks - my baby was losing weight. I'm now at 20 weeks and still breastfeeding. I give four bottles a day, when I started it was just 2oz in each bottle now it's 6.

I bf around 5 times a day plus one or more at night.

Oh and sorry it was just two bottles initially as well. One at bedtime and one at lunchtime.

Thank you! Just what I needed! My little one had colic early on and fed and fed to stop his tummy ache. I didn't realise that that was what he was doing until the HV mentioned it. That means I have no probs with supply but he had a massive growth spurt at 5wks and jumped from 50th percentile to over 75th and he just feeds and feeds! The amount of nappy changing that goes on in this house is incredible!

So hopefully I'll do a couple of bottles in the afternoon just to get him to space the feeds out a bit and encourage him to nap and have a bit of social time rather than cluster feed with micro naps all afternoon. He certainly seems happy to do that after the odd bottle of formula he's had so far... Fingers crossed!

I'm sure it doesn't work always but it really did for me. He started going down for a proper long nap after his bottle and being a bit more content generally. Good luck!