dreamfeeds - do they make any difference to your lo?

[2labs]

Just wondering, because I had been regularly dreamfeeding ds (13.5 weeks) with EBM at 10.30pm and he was waking up at 4am for his next feed (taking both boobs, seemed hungry) - the other day I decided to experiment and cut out the dreamfeed. He still woke up at 4am. Looks like I was wasting my time with the EBM (apart from helping his weight gain maybe...)

Has anyone else found this? Dreamfeeding seems to have at least a couple of hours' effect on the time between feeds for my friends' babies .

We tried to do the dreamfeed thing and my lo never took to it. Either we couldn't rouse him enough to take it or he'd still wake in the night for a feed anyway!!! However, my friend did the dreamfeed and her lo took to it straight away and from 3 weeks old used to go from 10.30pm to 6am straight!!!! I think it depends on the baby!!

they didnt have dreamfeeds in my day (ds's 9 and 7) [old hag emoticon]

Waking a sleeping baby seems all wrong to me - also I can't be faffed to express . My DS is 14 wks and if I'm lucky only wakes once for feed then goes straight back down again before waking me again some time between 6-7am

Dreamfeeding never worked with us. Just found that they woke up naturally when they woke up. So would be staying up deliberately in order to faff around trying to shove nipple in ds/dd's mouth and then they'd still wake up as usual. So I cut it out and just started going to bed super early and was better able to cope with the nightwaking as a result.

maewest - I don't wake him, that's supposed to be the beauty of dreamfeeding... It is quite funny to watch him glugging away ecstatically while still fast asleep. I've always done it with EBM in a bottle, as found it impossible to bf without him waking up.