5 month old dd not feeding well during the day

[suiledonn]

Hi, dd2 is 5 months old today. For the past few days it has been getting more and more difficult to get her to focus on her daytime feeds. She is constantly looking around and latching on and off. I have an almost 3 year old dd also so I can't leave her to take dd2 off to a darkened room for feeds. As a consequence she is getting frustrated and cross. Also she is bringing up lots more milk than usual which I think is because with all the short feeds she is getting too much foremilk. The same thing happened with dd1 but she was over 10 months at the time so I finished breastfeeding then as she seemed ready but I really don't want to stop with dd2 just yet. Anyone got any advice on what to do? Thanks

The only advice I can think of is to hold something that is interesting to her so she can look at it while she feeds. DD was exactly the same as this and I found this age pretty trying. We did get over it pretty quickly, though and am still bf.

I think this is a classic problem at that age! Also, I'm assuming you're close to weaning time(are you planning to wait to 6 months) which means your daughter needs loads of milk & at the same time is very distractible. We had the exact same problem at around that time. What helped to be honest was starting solids around 5 & a half months which meant gradually cutting down on milk feeds (but not too quickly, since it's important for them to get loads of milk still). What also helped is the darkened room thing, which in your situation wouldn't work that well, as you say. You could try structuring her feeds a bit more, i.e. not feed her that often so that she's a bit hungrier & a bit more eager to feed when the time comes. I'm not talking about letting her go hungry, just getting closer to feeding about every 3 hours (more or less). Not sure what else to advise; as I said, I had the same problem and tbh around that time I was finding it quite hard.