Questions re bottle fed 7 m.o. and weaning...

[arcadia96]

Started weaning DD at about 6 months doing combo of spoon feeding and baby led which is going ok with varied success, but I have some questions:

1. when do I start follow on formula? do I even need to? HV said no need to change from first milk, so what's the point of it then?!

1. will I need to decrease the amount of formula I give DD as she takes more food, and how will I know when to? At the moment she still has 36 oz a day (6 x 6oz per day as she has for several months, which I know is a lot).

1. Is it normal for her to bring up a bit of her solids a couple of hours after eating sometimes?

1. I'm still tending to give the bottle quite soon after solids as she sometimes gets a bit annoyed with the solids and the bottle calms her down. Should I be separating it out?

FYI, she is completely average weight but looking quite chubby! Not moving around much yet.

I suppose a lot of this is opinion/experience, but any hints welcome!

Thanks.

Hi.

You don't need to go on to follow-on milk, I personally stuck with the same stuff until my ds's turned a year and then gave full fat cows milk.
Here is a rough feeding routine that I had with my boys.

6am - a 7oz bottle of formula
6:30/7am - Some kind of breakfast cereal, followed by a yoghurt
10:am - 4/5oz of milk
nap
12:00 solid lunch followed by some fruit
2:30/3pm 4/5oz milk
5:00pm - solid dinner
7:00pm - 7oz milk

They both followed that kind of pattern really. Ds1 was puree fed and ds2 was BLW.

There isn't a right or wrong way, you just have to do what you feel your dd needs/wants.
I personally would keep milk and solids seperate, even by 10 mins. I'd try to split them up with a nappy change and a hug, try a story or some playing and then give the milk.
HTH

1. there is no need to change to follow on. It was invented to get round the ban on advertising first milks. I did switch to it around 9 months as it was cheaper.

2. I let my lo's guide me as to when they dropped a feed. At 6 months ds had 5 feeds (1 was in the night). He dropped his night feed at 8 months and had dropped his daytime feeds by 10 1/2 months leaving only the am and pm feed.

3. dont know - although my lo's were sometimes sick in the evening if they took too much milk after their dinner solids.

4. I split up milk/solids and gave milk first followed by solids an hour or more afterwards e.g. milk at 7am, 11am, 2.30pm, 7.15pm and gave breakfast at 8am, lunch at 12pm and dinner at 5pm. I offered water with the meals.

Thanks that's really helpful. So your routines are actually similar to each others once I write them out although initially they looked quite different. I basically need to change her routine quite a bit but that should work. I still do a dream feed at 10.30pm partly because I like it, and to help her sleep, but hopefully can drop that when she takes more solids in the day.

I found that it was easy to know when to drop a bottle as DS started leaving more in all his bottles and I stopped the morning one (and then the afternoon one) when he stopped asking for it (to be quite honest we went out one day and because we were doing something different we forgot to give him his 10 o'clock bottle, but when we remembered at half eleven we realised that he didn't seem to have missed it!).

My HV told me first milk was fine, so I never used follow-on milk.

I got into a muddle trying to fit bottles around meals, so I generally tried to wait half an hour after food for milk. Although if I left it too late to feed DS solids, he would insist he was so close to starvation that he needed a bottle immediately. I got round that by feeding him a little earlier to begin with, then (once he got the hang of eating) giving a little snack of biscuit/breadstick/rice cake etc about an hour before solids to stave off hunger.

My routines were also very similar to the ones above, but I gave DS an extra bottle at 5 as he couldn't last until bedtime (all 7oz)

Thanks babybouncer. Trouble with DD is she always drinks her whole bottle every time, never leaves anything, she is a very hungry (and increasingly chubby!) baby! And the trouble with me is I'm so comfortable with the routine we had that I'm finding it a bit tricky to work her meals into the day around sleeps as well. Will keep trying!