Newborn sleepy when feeding

[Lottie917]

Hi all,

Sorry this is going to be long. FTM here looking for some advice. Unfortunately I don't have many people I can ask that has experience with this or many other mummy friends.

My son is 6 days old. As a bit of background we only got discharged from hospital yesterday due to complications during delivery as both of us required antibiotics for possible infection.

This wasn't really a problem in the hospital but since being home DH and I have been struggling to wake our Newborn for about 50% of feeds. He's currently taking 2-2.5oz every 3-4 hours, and he also keeps falling to sleep again when actually feeding or if we stop midway to burp him, so it can take a while to get him to feed.

The midwife today said that he should ideally be on more like 3-3.5oz every 3-4 hours and I just can't see that we're going to get him to take that much at the moment. She thinks the sleepiness might be because he doesn't have the energy to wake himself due to needing more formula.

His appetite has gradually grown. I was wondering if the sleepiness is due to things like a change in environment (it's much quieter here at home than hosp), the fact that his milk is now warm (formula fed) whereas in hosp he was having the aptamil milk bottles at room temp and also as the antibiotics he was having finished yesterday, and if these are perhaps causing sleepiness too as a side effect.

To get him to wake either before feeding or during we find that a nappy change, clothes change, top and tail wash and sometimes skin to skin feeding works. We also change up feeding positions.

Things such as blowing on his face during feeding, tickling his toes/hands etc don't work at all.

Other times he wakes dead on 4 hours doing all the usual rooting, hands in mouth, mouth opening really wide, very alert and awake and searching for a bottle and feeds really well.

He weighs 8lb 1oz and on his 5 day check he had only lost 0.15kg (about 0.3lb) so surely that means he is feeding well to this point?

Just looking for some reassurance / advice and any tips or tricks on how to keep him awake for feeds? Also I know it varies to each baby, but is 2-2.5oz per feed really not enough for him despite not seeming hungry beyond this?

Any advice or similar experiences much appreciated.

Thanks!

You could try moving up to a faster paced teat. Some babies get tired because they are working too hard to get the milk flowing.

Congratulations btw

When my DD was a newborn I had the same problem! The midwife just said change her nappy to wake her up which never worked. We were referred to the children’s ward at our local hospital to check everything was ok. She was perfectly fine but like the PP said, have a look at the bottles/teats you are using. This was a game changer for me. I was using the Lansinoh bottles but the hospital said she could be finding it hard to get milk from. They gave me just a bog standard bottle and she started drinking a lot more from there and became more interested in feeding.

Thank you both! I've ordered some faster flowing teats so hopefully we'll start to see some improvement! DH and I have reverted back to using the aptamil bottles I was using in hosp as we've got loads left over and DS seems much happier once feeding from these ones at the moment and can take a bit more milk too