Baby slowly dropping percentiles

[Lauren8642]

Am I being paranoid or is this normal?
my daughter lost quite a bit of weight at birth took 2 weeks to get back to birth weight (we had to wake her every 3 hours for milk formula fed) the HV saw her quite regularly up until the 16th December because she was happy with her weight gain, I’ve weighed her twice my self now and she’s gain but still slowly dropping on her percentile line, is this normal?
I’ve rang the HV help line to plot it on her chart and they said she’s following the 9th centile line but according to this she’s dropping every time I’m getting her weighed.
I know I should trust the HV but I’m just over thinking everything

Are you getting plenty of wet and poo nappies?

@Ariela yeah we are and she’s having roughly between 600ml-730ml a day ( offer her 5 oz every feed)

Then quite probably HV is right and she's just settling to a lower percentile. I'd be worried if she wasn't consuming as much and/or wasn't weeing/pooing, she is after all adding weight each time. Also check she's bright and cheery and not constantly whinging and is awake and looking about at times, and not just very sleepy all the time.
Have you tried offering her feed at more frequent intervals? It could be she's doing a growth spurt and is thus temporarily using more energy to grow in length as opposed to pile on weight, so offering a bit more frequently might compensate, although the growth curve is never a completely evenly smooth curve IME.

I always remember a friend's mum (queen of the rummage sales, RIP Doris) found the most delightful blue red and white sailor suit style dungarees, decorated with little anchors, whales etc - very beautifully done, an unheard of posh USA brand. I washed them, daughter wore them and I decided I'd let them out an inch on each of the straps as she was nearing the end of adjustment, so unpicked, added some fabric and machined them back together as soon as they were dry from the washing machine - only to find they simply did not fit - in perhaps 4 days she'd grown in length such that I could no longer put the straps on, and I had to unpick and sew a block of even more fabric in to attach the lengthened straps to!

I would take her to your local weigh in clinic just to get her checked again.

She should be having between 150 ml and 200 ml per kilo per day, so if she’s 5 kilos she is getting ever so slightly less than the lowest amount.

Does she drain the 5 Floz?

HV & IBCLC here - This is really concerning, she hasn’t settled on a lower centile, she’s continuing to drop which isn’t right.

If there is infant feeding support available locally would look to access it so that they can fully observe a feed/check if full assessment of oral function/tongue tie is needed. If there isn’t and you have the budget to, you can find an IBCLC locally who can do a full assessment/review with you (many think ibclc’s only see bf families when the truth is many of our clients are bottle feeding/combi feeding because of the challenges the family’s are facing & our key thing is wanting to support them meeting their goals).

There’s a “find an IBCLC” feature on the lactation consultants of GB website x

I was going to suggest that it may be Tongue Tie too. Was this investigated wheb she had the initial drop in weight? Was the weight drop 10% or more?

And are any of these symptoms sound familiar?

@BoobyBird29 when I rang the HV helpline and asked them to plot it on her chart they said she’s following the 9th percentile but I can see when I’ve plotted it my self that it is slightly dropping.

She got regular weighed by the HV until beginning of December I think when she dropped from 23% to 14% that’s when she dropped a night feed so we had to make sure she was getting more milk in the day time.

I was thinking a tongue tie but would that still cause slow weight gain even when she’s drinking most of her bottles? She has between 600-730 ml a day. I thought a tongue tie only really caused problems with BF cause they struggle to latch which means no milk/not as much.
She’s hardly sick maybe the odd time after burping but that’s more spit up, but she is sometimes sick like water hours before milk and has a lot of excess saliva it seems like.

Did you have a look at the link I posted @Lauren8642?

See if you have an infant feeding team in your area as I was in a pretty similar position to you- we were readmitted to hospital on day 5 as she’d lost more than the % weight they expected! No one really helped there it was really only the infant feeding team in the community who help!

The infant feeding team were so helpful and came every week and weighed her and supported us the lovely lady was so invaluable! See if there’s one in your area!

I was prepared for the stress and anxiety of BF when it doesn’t seem to be working!

We did combo feed until 9 months then I knocked the BF on the head!

Hey m’lovely - firstly, it would be worth downloading the eRedbook app - you can then plot all of her weights & see easily where she’s sitting with the centiles - if she’s bouncing between 25th to 9th that’s less concerning than dropping through the big centile lines (am so use to that being what “dropping through centiles” means I thought that was the size of drop you meant).

Tongue ties/the tension that comes with them can mean weight loss is slower as they’re using so much more energy with feeding x