7 month old switching from breast to bottle- Follow on milk, help!

[Ziggy24]

Just joined today, if only I had found this brill site earlier!

I have breast fed my 7 month old and she has started to have a bottle of Hipp Organic Good Night Milk every night before she goes to bed as part of her routine.

My intention is to wean her off bf.

I have introduced SMA Follow On Milk during the day. On the tin it recommends 500-600 ml a day (3 x 180ml bottles). The tin says "it is suitable for babies over 6 months old and is not intended to replace breast feeding, it should only be used as part of a varied weaning diet."

My daughter has a good appitite, eats well and just started to drink water out of a cup.

Please can anyone tell me if this milk (and her Good Night milk) will be enough for her if I give up breastfeeding completely or will I be best to put her onto formula milk?

I used follow on milk when stopping breastfeeding as I thought it is formula with iron in it. I used SMA with DS1 and he thrived on it, unfortunately it made DS2 constipated so I switched to Cow and Gate which has been fine.

I used goodnight milk just before his bedtime but only for a couple of weeks as DS2 started refusing it. But in that time it had already formed the habit of him sleeping through the night.

Thanks for the quick reply! It just seems that 3 bottles of 180ml during the day is not enough! I suppose thats because I am used to breastfeeding all the time!

Also the other thing is that she sicks a bit more, when I bf she hardly does it at all, is that the deal with bottle milk in general or do you think it is because of this particular brand doesn't agree with her?

It has had the opposite effect of constipation and she has the runs, although I am not sure if this is because she is teething...

at 7 months ds still had 5 milk feeds so if your lo seems to want more than 3 feeds let them have them. A minimum of 20oz is recommended between 6 months and 1 year so it doesn't matter if they take more than the tin says

I think follow-on milk is quite a bad idea. A lot of people I know have had problems with it. Babies can't absorb the iron added to formula anyway, it just goes through and blocks them up.
I'm pretty sure follow-on milk was just invented to get round the formula advertising ban anyway!

I would avoid the follow on milk, we had problems with dd not thriving at all while on it. HV eventually told me to go change to stage 1 formula (dd was bf until 8 months old) as it has all the nutrients needed for a growing baby. We've had no problems since changing.

hth

Thanks for the replies, I think I might give the stage 1 formula another go. I tried her with SMA Gold and she spat it out, maybe because it was a sour taste compared to bm??
I suppose it is just trial and error, does anyone know which formulas are a bit sweeter?

my lo's never had problems with follow on milk (I used it because it worked out a bit cheaper than using the first milks). You could buy a few different small cartons of milks and see if she prefers any of them - saves you buying a whole tub that might get wasted.