Hi everyone,
My baby is 6 weeks old. We originally exclusively breastfed, until she lost a lot of weight and it came to light that she had tongue tie. The midwives suggested I kept trying to offer her the breast but, as she was not latching properly or for long enough, give her expressed milk followed by formula. The tongue tie was snipped at 3 weeks and although breastfeeding improved slightly, we were both very miserable and struggling to make it work. I continued to express and formula feed until she was just short of 5 weeks then my milk seemed to dry up. For the last week and a few days, she has been exclusively formula fed.
Since a few days old she has been using a MAM teat size number 1. Over the last few days she hasn't managed to finish a feed in one go - she is getting tired, falling asleep and wanting to return to the bottle 30 mins to an hour later (and repeat for the entire day because as she is not getting a full feed, she is in a permanent cycle of grazing!). After doing some research, we wondered if we needed to go up a teat size so we started her on MAM size 2 last night. We expect it will take some getting used to for her, but is it normal that milk is now spilling everywhere and that she is still not finishing a bottle? If so, how long should we expect the adjustment to take?
Other things to consider:
- She has had a bit of a cold since Thursday. Could this be interfering with feeding?
- We are not sure whether she has reflux or just normal baby spit up. She does spit up on at least a few feeds a day (small amounts) - particularly if she is laid down after feeding. Over the last few days the spit up seems to have gotten more frequent. Could this tie in with the cold? Will a faster teat make reflux worse? She is quite a windy baby but since starting the size 2 teat I would say that aspect has improved.
Apologies for the long post - first baby and quite the worrier!