How does it work?

[Sazaroo]

Morning lovely ladies

My LO is 4.5 weeks old and i intend to introduce a bottle in a couple of weeks so that my DH can help out with night feeds as im soooooo exhausted. Ive been expressing so have plenty of EBM for him to offer her.

My question is tho, how does this work with my milk supply? She feeds every 2 hours during the night so what happens to this milk if DH is feeding her instead of me? Do I need to get up to express during the night still? In which case him feeding her would be pointless as its meant to be helping me get some sleep.

Thank you xx

 

[minties]

At first your breasts would get quite engorged, but over time they would learn not to make milk at that time of night as it is not needed.

As you baby gets older she would (hopefully!) start stretching out the time between night feeds anyway, so this would naturally occur.

If you just get your OH to take over one or two feeds a night, and you still manage to pump enough spare milk for this easily, then personally I wopuld go for it. I wish I had gotten my OH to do this for me in the early weeks.

 

[Nervous_1]

At 6 weeks your supply begins to regulate and missing the odd feed here and there won't cause a problem. However, if you didn't feed at all during the night when your body is used to it will (a) cause you to be engorged and (b) cause your supply to decrease as you are saying that your LO doesn't need that milk.

Could you maybe do a couple of feeds in the night? Solves both problems yet you will still get a reasonable amount of sleep

 

[Sazaroo]

Thats great thank you!
It would literally just be the one feed a night for now to give me a chance to sleep for a longer block of time.
Thank you xx

 

[stephwiggy]

Just have the pump or baby to had as soon as you wake up and lots of spare breastpads - lol

the first time we did this i had space hoppers and made quite a mess haaaaa

 

[Heather9603]

Just FYI, don't be surprised if you start to leak whenever she starts crying in the middle of the night. So I'd go to bed with those little pads in while your body gets used to not needing to supply at night.