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Should I give an extra night feed?

5 replies

ClaraLaraLaLa · 18/01/2018 13:45

Hi all
DD is 4 months and going through a sleep regression, she is suddenly constantly hungry at night but when I give her a bottle she doesn't drink much of it before going g back to sleep and then wakes hungry again a bit later. I try to wake her up to have a bit more but she won't. She has 2 night bottles and drinks about 60ml each time. I breastfeed between bottles but she will suck as long as I let her and then wake up when I take my boob away. I have low milk supply and she normally will only breastfeed when she's sleepy.
my question is should I give her an extra night bottle? It would help me get more sleep at the moment as she normally sleeps for at least 2 hours after a bottle, but I'm worried that if I get her into the habit of feeding more at night I'm creating problems for myself further down the road.
Do babies tend to naturally improve after a sleep regression? She was sleeping well before.
Any advice would be appreciated, nearly all my friends exclusively breastfeed so I'm struggling to know what's a good night feeding routine for a mostly bottle fed baby.

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
user1493413286 · 19/01/2018 10:42

Prior to the 4 month sleep regrsssion my DD was having 1 bottle about 3/4am then when the regression hit and she woke at 1am too I just gave her a bottle both times. I was too tired to do much else and she wouldn’t settle without it.
The sleep regression passed after about 4-6 weeks and I night weaned her by about 7 months so I wouldn’t worry too much about creating bad habits.

InDubiousBattle · 19/01/2018 10:44

Does she have a dummy?

ClaraLaraLaLa · 20/01/2018 21:52

Thanks for the replies. I've tried to give her a dummy but she doesn't seem interested, it just falls out.

OP posts:
monkeyted · 23/01/2018 13:25

My DD went from needing one night feed (around 4am) to needing three night feeds at 4 months. I was exclusively breastfeeding at the time but also had a low milk supply. When I started combined feeding at 5 months, she also would take around 60ml at a time - and still needed 3 feeds a night. Someone suggested this meant she wasn't really hungry and was just waking for the bottles out of habit - but I believed she was waking due to hunger and was just used to drinking small amounts at a time!

Anyway, at nearly 8 months now she's now used to drinking bigger bottles (drinking three a day, plus one breastfeed), and is also now eating three solids meals a day. But she needed 2-3 night feeds every night until solids were established. As soon as they were, she slept through the night.

So based on our experience I recon it would be ok to give her another night bottle - as she probably is hungry for it and will hopefully grow out of it once she's ready.

Lemondrop99 · 23/01/2018 13:37

Following as interested. My DS 3.5 months has started waking more in the night and wanting more feeds. It's the quickest way to settle him but I'm worried about creating a habit where he needs a feed to go back to sleep.

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