Another thing - do dreamfeeds work with BF babes?

[littleweed10]

how do you do it, with boob or bottle of expressed milk
do you wake them or do it in their sleep.
and, most importantly does it work?!!

DS is 5 months old, and normally feeds one to two times a night.

I am majorly sleep deprived and also suffer with insomnia after feeding him in night. Any suggestions please, desperate! x

Usually when i am working with family i wake baby up, change nappy and take to mum as i would in the day, for 'night' feeds i take baby as and when baby wakes and don't do nappy unless poopy.

It meant waking baby at 11.15pm, baby then slept till 3-3.30ish, fed and back to sleep and then baby was woken at 6.30am (older children/school run), without the 11.15 waking she would sleep from 8pm to 1ish then wake again 4.30ish so not ready to eat at 6.30am and mum had school run so couldn't feed.

I found the dream feed hard to do with breastfeeding, the baby didn't really wake up enough to eat unless I turned the light on, changed his nappy etc. Which is ok if you want to feed at that time, but not really a dream feed at that point. Think it depends on what you want to achieve, my DS is currently going from 1930-sometme between 1 and 4, then will eat again at 7 even if he's fed as late as 430 although he then eats a bit less.

Sorry to hear about your insomnia. In which case maybe worth a try? But don't stay up to do it, do it before you go to bed and then see how long he goes.

Also, once you start doing the dream feed it's hard to know when to stop as you don't know how long they'll sleep without it...

i found with my dd it didn't make a difference if i gae her a dreamfeed or not. i think she never really took enough in to fill her up.

with ds (4mo) i tried it a few times and it did seem to stop him waking at 1am. he latches on and sucks strongly whilst staying asleep. so it may just depend on the baby.

to do it i would just lift them gently out of cot and just touch my nipple to their lips and see if they latched on.

I started a dream feed when ds started waking at 4am after previously doing 7pm to 6am. I used to lift him when I went to bed, around 10.30 and he would latch on in his sleep. However, it never stopped the 4am feed. After about 3 months I tried to stop the dream feed only to find that he would wake up looking for it. It took about a week to break the habit and yes, he still wakes about 4...!

Unfortunately I didn't really find that dream feeding made a great deal of difference to any of mine. Once they had stopped naturally waking at around 10.30 / 11pm (which they all did by about 6 or 7 weeks) then whether or not I woke and fed them at that time didn't seem to make much of a difference to when they next woke. I tried doing it both as a standard bf and with expressed bottles, which didn't seem to make a difference. It's definitely worth trying for a bit though as some people find it really helps. I do think 'dream feed' is a bit of a misnomer though - all mine had to be properly woken up in order to feed (whether bf or a bottle of EBM) - then again, maybe that's why it didn't work for us, i.e. because I had to actually wake them up and disrupt their sleep patterns. Who knows. Try it - what have you got to lose? If it doesn't help then drop it again after trying for a week or so.