anyone combi feeding? im getting desperate....

[honey915]

My 4.5 mo baby is ebf at the moment. She does have a dummy and was sleeping really well... Going down 5 hours waking then coming in to sleep with me after a feed. Now she just Wakes all the time. People say no to solids this early but would just one bottle at night help at all? I have scoured the net desperately in the small hours which only leads to me feeling so confused about what to do for the best. There is so much conflicting advice. I fed my ds1 for 5 months and ds2 for two years. First baby was a pretty good sleeper and second was dreadful and was only a few years ago so I never really recovered from lack of sleep anyway!! So now I just feel totally drained. I am crying all the time! I already have anxiety disorder which is getting overwhealming because of no sleep and I have just recovered from mastitis which the dr advised me to get three days bed rest for !!!!! Pah! Clearly she doesn't have any kids let alone three to pressume three days bed rest is remotely possible!!!!

Please advise 're combi feeding though. When does your lo feed and what is the sleep like?

 

[Larkspur]

It's more likely to be the four-month sleep regression at that age. Solids won't help, in fact they might upset her stomach and make her sleep worse.

 

[honey915]

I'm not considering solids really more like a bottle before bed of formula instead of my milk. Not because I think she's hungry but because I'm hoping it will sedate her a bit so I can sleep more than 20 minutes straight!

 

[cjwn]

I switched from ebf to combi feeding at 4.5 months with DS1 and same again with DS2 at 5 months (would have done it earlier but he was a bottle refuser until recently). The only reason I did this was to get them to sleep more, lots of people disagree with my approach, but it worked a treat.

I give my last breastfeed around dinner time then we get the boys ready for bed with some wind-down time. Once they're bathed and in their PJs the big one gets a cup of milk and the little one gets and 8oz bottle of formula with bed time stories. They go down about 8pm. The little one usually wakes up once or twice before midnight, but will usually then sleep through until morning.

We use the readymade cartons of formula for convenience. They are expensive but it's only for one bottle a day at the moment. I've started weaning now that DS2 is six months old and so I'm going to start switching out breast feeds for bottle feeds so that I can go back to work soon.

 

[caitlyn2009]

My son is not a great sleeper and introducing formula before bed has not made a difference. I think it is more sleep regression/ habit than hunger

 

[Eleanor ace]

My DD was a terrible sleeper. We started her on a bottle of formula a night at about 8 months old and it seemed to make a difference for a couple of days but then she went back to waking just as much. At 9.5 months she stopped BF'ing and went onto formula and still woke just as much so for us formula didn't help her sleep better .

 

[honey915]

Thank you all so much for responding. I'm going to wait one more night and if she is still being a terror I am going to attempt a bottle for a few nights and see how it goes. If it fails I will just continue breast and if it works I will just give formula at bedtime only

 

[bdb84]

My DD (10 weeks) is a dream sleeper and we combi-feed. She gets one 3oz bottle of formula a day (maybe once or twice a week she'll get two instead of one). We nurse all morning and afternoon, and her bottle comes into play around 5PM or so in the evening. We nurse before bed which tends to be between 7-7:30PM.

Up until this past week, I would get in one dream feed at 10PM before going to bed myself. It would take a minute or two to rouse her *just* enough to get her to nurse for one solid letdown, and then I'd lay her back in her crib and she'd be right to sleep again. She sleeps through until 4-5 in the AM, and then I nurse her and she's back down until 7:30ish in the morning.

I stopped doing the dream feed this past week and so far it hasn't affected her sleep.