advice needed please!!

[lindso]

My little girl is nearly 5 weeks old. 7lbs 2 at birth and now (last Friday) 7lbs 5 after losing almost 10%. HV advised me to express an hour after each feed and then top up with this expressed milk at next feed. concerned she's not gaining enough weight. kellymom website also advises this to as a means to increase supply. i can't express much - 2.5oz's first thing this morning, paltry 1 oz at 1pm. can see HV advising formula top ups if weight doesn't gain, which I'm not totally against as long as i continue to mainly bf.

I'm now expressing three times a day - sometimes her feeds run into each other (cluster feeds in evening and is basically on me from 6 to 9) and its difficult to separate one feed from another. she also can take over an hour to feed, and then might want more 1.5 hours later, or 2 hours, or 3. sleeps well at night (up twice for feeds, doesn't have much, goes back to sleep) so i think she's making up for it during the day.

i read about mums feeding their baby at set times - three hours intervals - my girl takes so long to feed i can't see her ever getting to this - is this other people's experience?

suppose what i'm asking is....does this sound OK? normal? will i ever be able to leave the house again???!

Normal, absolutely normal, and OK. You will be able to leave the house again, I promise (why not now? Are you worried about bf in public? Honestly, most people don't have negative experiences. When she's zooming around you will sometimes long for those days of just being able to take her out and sit in a cafe reading the paper while she feeds and/or sleeps ).

ds used to take forever to feed (and very frequently too), but somewhere between the 3 and 4 month mark the feeds started getting a lot shorter, and at that point at the latest bf was so, so very worth it (we had considerable trouble inthe early days).

Expressing can increase supply in some circumstances, but a baby is always going to be more efficient at getting milk out than a breast pump, so I would be inclined to ditch the top-ups and replace them with bfs.

yes it all sounds fine. if you are worried your best bet for bf advice are the national helplines run by the NCT or ABM. HVs mostly have very little proper training in bf at all.

you will start to see a pattern of feeds emerging as your baby gets more settled. at the moment it's all feed feed feed to get your supply going and to make you keep your baby close to you. little babies need to be close to their carer, hence lots of feeding to start off. gradually you'll see something like a 3 hourly pattern emerging, but you may see 2 hourly before that.

keep going, your doing really well!