Help moving from exclusively expressing to breastfeeding

[MrsT65]

I'm currently expressing 8 times a day and now our DD has had her tongue tie cut I want to try getting her to breastfeed. So does anyone have any tips of how I would move from expressing to breastfeeding.

I do want to still express enough for about 2 bottles a day.

Thank you

Sorry that you haven't had any responses to this @MrsT65.

How are you both getting on?

We did this. No tongue tie but we couldn’t establish breastfeeding at birth for various reasons so I exclusively pumped for just over 4 months until she randomly learnt to latch and feed. Obviously I’d given up hope by then but was still offering breast (very occasionally by then if I’m honest) and one day it just seemed to have clicked and she knew what to do.

How old is your DC? I’m guessing younger? As a small baby my DD wasn’t getting it at all. Just wanted the bottle and didn’t have the patience to persevere with breast. It was very hard to find the sweet spot between too hungry to be bothered to try but not hungry enough to be interested. Especially when pumping takes up so much of your time.

Is there any breastfeeding support or groups you can access? I think La Leche League had a really detailed guide on reintroducing breastfeeding.

She is 5 weeks. She has latched an odd time and then I topped up with expressed milk. I'm just concerned about breastfeeding and then expressing and getting clogged.

Did you just stop expressing or did you reduce the amount of times you pumped over a few weeks.

Thank you, I will have a look at La Leche League.

Kellymom site also has tons of info, I bet they'd have something on this.

I think it's have the pump set up, when she's hungry try to latch her on, if it doesn't work out then bottle then pump. Just keep at it

She’s still very young so plenty of time and she’s already latching which sounds positive!

I started doing what you’re doing with latching and then topping up but once I could trust she was actually feeding off me I would count that as a feed and a pump session ticked off my schedule if you see what I mean? And gradually kept swapping a pump to a feed until I was only pumping if I had to because she was being left with DH or something.

I don’t know how to link on here but the La Leche League article was called Getting breastfeeding on track after a difficult start – the “3 Keeps”.

I'd just latch your baby on the breast basically constantly. Any murmur, latch on. When you're at home, wear an open shirt. When you're out, don't wear a bra, so there's less of a barrier if you need to give a quick feed. If you're latching on literally 100 times a day, your baby will get used to it very quickly and you'll be able to stop expressing. This is how I transitioned from mix feeding to almost-EBF with my first

Thank you for your help, we will continue doing what we are doing. I am hopefully getting referred to the infant feeding team who will help with a plan.