He's being exclusively bf and bless him he's doing great!
I've been expressing for a week as I'd like the option of being able to give him a bottle of ebm at some point in the future and now have a small stock in the freezer. However it is soooo difficult to fit it into EVERY day that what I'm hoping to do is express approx 3 days per week and give him that milk in a bottle later in the day. Then if I know that I need to leave him a bottle of it (eg my hair is woefully past needing a cut and I really need to go to the hairdresser before my mop is mistaken for just that) I can fit in a couple of additional pumping sessions in advance.
My first question is this, what constitutes a "feed" at this stage? This morning I expressed 6oz in a short space of time but I can't believe that a 11 or 12 lb ish 5 week old would drink that much in one feed! And especially as i've read that babies can get out more than a pump can.
I've seen the formula that says he needs 2.5oz per lb of his bodyweight in a 24 hour period, = 28-30 ish oz. As he's still feeding every 2 hours 24/7 (2.5 if I'm lucky, 1.5 if I'm not- yawn!) that's 12 feeds in a day and therefore approx 2.5 oz per feed.
So now I'm confused, I don't want to put all that effort into expressing vast quantities of milk that just isn't needed (but at the same time I'd want to express a bit more than required just in case, just not double the amount!). Do you think it is conceivable that he actually drinks that much? It seems unlikely to me given the apparent walnut-ish size of babies tums at birth but wanted to check with the all-knowing mumsnetters, you've always been able to answer my questions before .
Second, do you think that giving him a bottle of ebm just 3 times a week is enough to keep him used to it? With ds1, we made the mistake of not giving it to him often enough and when we really needed him to have a bottle, he point blank refused the teat he'd been happy with a few weeks before (thankfully by that stage he was on solids and so my mum put it on his weetabix/mixed it into other foods etc and gave other fluids).
Babies are great for people with analytical male type brains, there's a lot to ponder (sadly for me with a entirely female type brain I'm just not good at working stuff out like this, plus I'm unable to do sudoku)