Advice appreciated..

[miccoops81]

My little girl is two weeks old and we started formula feeding from day 4.

I FF my first and he would take his bottle, wind and have done awake time before settling to sleep. Also started FF early, from about 10 days.

With my DD she takes ages to take a bottle and settle, particularly evening and night.. Sometimes upto 90 mins - 2 hours. On and off the bottle, we tried going up a teat size but not really helped. She isn't crying but won't settle and will refuse the bottle and then 15 mins later take it again.. It's making the nights so tough as each wake for food will take she's to get her back in bed.

Anyone have similar experience? I'm wondering if she will grow out of it? Or should I try comfort milk as it might be a build up of wind?

Any help really appreciated!

Thanks

 

[MindUtopia]

Have you had her checked for a tongue tie? If she doesn't seem in obvious discomfort, I wouldn't assume it's wind or anything like that. Some babies are just snackers and slow eaters, and remember that feeding even from a bottle is time for comfort and closeness and bonding and sometimes it's just being close to you that's nice, so they aren't in any hurry. But the popping on and off makes me think it could be something structural that's causing her to struggle to latch to the bottle or draw milk out of the teat efficiently. My daughter has a lip tie and a high palate, and she doesn't have a tongue tie per se, but I was told she did have a 'short tongue' which acted very much like a tongue tie, even though there was no obvious tie that could be clipped. We were still BF (with great difficulty because of all these things) at that age, but when we did switch to bottles around 10 weeks, she had a lot of trouble latching to the bottle and would pop on and off and really struggled to eat. This lasted until about 5 months. I'm not sure what changed then, other than maybe her mouth was big enough to latch better or her facial muscles got stronger than it meant latching wasn't as much of an issue. I really don't know. But I remember always being very aware of it whenever we were around other babies. All the other babies (BF or FF) would just silently and easily eat, and I had this really noisy baby, who was slow to eat and was constantly falling off the bottle. That's what comes to mind first for me, so might be worth checking out. If they find something is wrong, like a tongue tie, it may or may not be worth getting it clipped.

As for settling, it was definitely hard, but I don't think it had anything to do with that. I just had a baby that always wanted to be attached to me (which is perfectly normal), so putting her down to sleep, even next to me in bed, was difficult for the first 6-8 weeks. She wouldn't finish her milk and be put down awake until about 9 months and even then not always. That I think it gets better with time as well, but didn't have anything to do with feeding issues, really.