Baby Lead Weaning and Bottle Feeding - can it be done?

[ElmMum]

I've been reading up on BLW and all the info seems to assume you'll be exclusively breastfeeding.

My DD is 4.5 months old. I don't plan to BLW til she's 6 months or thereabouts. At the moment she has a BF in the morning, then 2 bottles of expressed breast milk and 2 bottles of formula per day.

She was exclusively breastfed for the first 2 months, then had 1 bottle of formula a day in month 3, 2 bottles in month 4. I'm now winding down to just one breastfeed and one bottle of expressed breast milk, with the rest formula.

The plan was to be entirely formula by 6 months and then to introduce solids. But now I'm thinking this might interfere with my plan to BLW.

I can't find any info to explain why BLW works better with exclusively breastfed babies other than they can control their intake and so won't overeat.

Am I missing something? Has anyone else done BLW with a bottle fed baby?

Yeah it's fine, my ds was bottle fed and got on fine with blw. It's just that all the research was done on breastfed babies.

Cool. And how long before the solid food starts to actually replace some of the formula he got each day?

Any BLW tips?

Are you not allowed to recommend other websites on here? I'm quite new so I don't know. I'll just say if you look up baby lead weaning online, you should find some stuff and a blog where someone who's a MN regular I think has done blw who bottlefed.

Linking is fine Starshiptrooper!

Aitch's blog and forum

Elm mum, you will find that gradually the volume of food your baby takes in will increase and the feeds will naturally start to decrease (she will start to not be able to finish her midday bottle, perhaps, or there simply won't be enough hours in the day for all the bottles and all the meals!)

Tips, tips.... well, a nice simple wipe clean highchair like the ikea antilopp one is good to have, and you can buy plastic mats/sheets to go under the highchair to catch the mess which is better than having to scrub your floor every day.

Don't be afraid to feed baby in the buff, or in a cheapo vest. Bibs are good in theory but in practice by the time my ds was about 9 months he wouldn't keep them on. Keep extremely messy foods like spag bol for just before bathtime!

Thanks everyone. Just spent an interesting hour reading Aitch's blog about BLW. Hilarious and really helpful. Am definitely going to go for it. Need to be a bit careful as my niece has very severe food allergies, I have mild hayfever and DH has mild asthma, so poor bub has a fairly high allergy risk.

Elmmum, on a slightly different note, I'm planning on slowly switching to FF's just like you have, what feeds did you replace first? Did you express at all to keep your supply up? or do you just allow it to reduce as the BF does??