🚨 Advance warning 🚨 This forum will be closing on 1st May – please see our pinned thread for more information.
Options
Few questions - feeding and sleeping and weight......
Millie is 7 weeks old today and I'm not sure I'm getting everything right.
How much forumla is your LO having?
I always make up 6 bottles of 5 ounces. Sometimes she has 5, others she barely scrapes 3. Like today, she had 5 at 7.30, 3 at 11, 3 about 2, and 2-3 about 5. It doesn't seem enough! I'm not sure how much weight she has gained as have not been visited by the HV for weeks, which leads me to....
Should I be taking her to get weighed?
Everyone seems to know the weight of their LO. I haven't got a clue, I can only tell she's putting on weight by holding her/her clothes. There is a drop-in clinic I can go to but haven'tt been yet - does anyone go regularly?
How much does your LO sleep during the day?
She gets very cranky when tired but won't have a nap.
Some times she seems hungry but too tired and cranky to take the bottle, but I struggle trying to get her to nap more than 20 mins a time during the day. She always seems to fight it but has a tired cry. Any tips?
What time is bedtime?
I'm trying to get a routine and just this week I have been brave enought to get her upstairs at 7/7.30ish with the monitor on. My mum says I should be aiming for 6pm. What times are everyone doing. Last night it was bed for 7, slept til 10 then 10.30 til 4, 4.30 til 7, which I was really pleased with.
Hope everyone is well - not had much chance to get on here recently!
How much forumla is your LO having?
I always make up 6 bottles of 5 ounces. Sometimes she has 5, others she barely scrapes 3. Like today, she had 5 at 7.30, 3 at 11, 3 about 2, and 2-3 about 5. It doesn't seem enough! I'm not sure how much weight she has gained as have not been visited by the HV for weeks, which leads me to....
Should I be taking her to get weighed?
Everyone seems to know the weight of their LO. I haven't got a clue, I can only tell she's putting on weight by holding her/her clothes. There is a drop-in clinic I can go to but haven'tt been yet - does anyone go regularly?
How much does your LO sleep during the day?
She gets very cranky when tired but won't have a nap.
Some times she seems hungry but too tired and cranky to take the bottle, but I struggle trying to get her to nap more than 20 mins a time during the day. She always seems to fight it but has a tired cry. Any tips?
What time is bedtime?
I'm trying to get a routine and just this week I have been brave enought to get her upstairs at 7/7.30ish with the monitor on. My mum says I should be aiming for 6pm. What times are everyone doing. Last night it was bed for 7, slept til 10 then 10.30 til 4, 4.30 til 7, which I was really pleased with.
Hope everyone is well - not had much chance to get on here recently!
0
Replies
She crys alot and is very loud so we tend to keep her with us so as not to disturb ds but then i don't think its helping her by me taking her up and moving her when she's just settled.
i'll watch with earnest to see if anyone has any advice!
P.s i'm glad its not just tilly who seems to fight sleeping :roll:
Here's what is happening with Evie, she is 8 weeks old.
Im combi feeding her, she has breast first thing in a morning, at tea time and through the night. Also for any extra snacks during the day, she's had a larger appetite recently so has been having an extra breast feed. Throughout the day she is having Aptamil, 5 or 6oz however for her supper, as I call it, she hardly ever takes a full bottle, most of the time she has 3 to 4oz at that feed. We have a bit of a feeding routine going now, generally its breast at 6/7am, bottle at 9am ish, bottle at 12.30/1pm ish, bottle again about 4pm, breast at 6pm then supper bottle at 8pm.
I go to a post natal group every Wednesday at my GP surgery which is run by health visitors. I have Evie weighed there every fortnight. Its recorded in her red book and plotted on the graph. This is really useful to see if they are gaining weight at the right rate. Evie is between the 75th and 91st centiles.
Sleeping during the day - we have had some issues, if we tend to stay at home she seems to refuse to sleep, she may nap for the odd 20 minutes here and there but nothing beneficial and like your Millie she may then become overtired and grumpy. This has lead me to venturing out most days, I go to a couple of baby groups and we're doing baby massage, I see friends and just take her for a walk, even if Im only out for an hour at least she gets a reasonable snooze. Being in the car or her pram sends her to sleep 99% of the time so maybe try taking Millie out for a walk or go out in the car and hopefully she'll drop off. At home I tend to have music on and she will drop off, having a suck on her dummy also helps her to sleep during the day (sometimes she'll just spit it out tho!).
Bedtime for Evie is 8.30pm. We think this is early enough at the moment and she is sleepy by 8pm most of the time and ready for her bottle and bed. She has been doing really well with her night time sleeping and has been sleeping 6-8 hours before waking for her night time feed. Last night she slept through for the first time and I woke at 6.50am wondering what was going on!!
Hope this helps, Im sure you're doing a great job. If you take her to be weighed its a handy time to discuss any concerns you may have x
Feeding
She now takes between 5-6oz for most feeds, but will sometimes cry for more at her lunch time feed, and will take another 1-2oz (although I think this might have been a bit of a delayed growth spurt, as the last couple of days it's been back to 6oz). Until a week ago it was 4-5oz. She has 5 feeds a day, going roughtly 3.5/4 hrs between. She was breast fed for 6 weeks, then combination for 2 weeks, so has only been fully ff for 2 weeks.
I have read that a baby should take roughtly 2.5 times their weight in oz over a 24hr period. i.e if your lo is 10lb, they should have a total of 25oz of formula - 5 x 5oz bottles.
Getting Weighed
I posted something similar a week or so ago as I hadn't had E weight for a while and was a bit frightened of baby clincs (I had this picture of lots of mums holding screaming naked babies queing up to be weighed!). I braved it last week (with DH for back-up) and it was fine, there was only 1 other mum and baby in there! I hope to get her weighed every two weeks now, as she's only a tiddler on the 9th centile.
However, if lo is eating, has wet and dirty nappies and seems contented I shouldn't imagine there is any great need to get them weighed. I know Esme is growing and gaining weight as she keeps outgrowing her clothes.
Daytime Sleep
E was the same as your lo, and would fight daytime naps making late afternoon/evenings with her horrible as she was so over tired. She still doesn't nap much during the day, I did get her into a routine of having at least 1 1.5/2hr nap at some point during the day, but dh has been off work for the last 2 weeks and that routine seems to have gone out the window and she will now only sleep for 30mins at a time and then only on someone (being spoilt by daddy!) - it's nasty mummies job this week to get her back to napping for longer and on her own!
Bedtime
We've had E in a bedtime routine since about 7 weeks, and was the best thing we did! She has a bottle about 7, followed by a bath and a massage, I then rock/cuddle and sing to her for about 10 mins, by which time she is dozing off and put her in her moses basket. She's normally in her basket by 8pm and asleep by 8.30 at the latest.
She then sleeps throught to 7-8am, with one feed somewhere between 2-4am. I'm going to try dream feeding her about 11 next week to see if I can get a full night sleep! Once we sorted her night time sleeping her daytime napping also improved.
It's good to hear that E is actually quite normal and I hope our experience does help - I don't think we did much to change her, she just seem to set her own routine when she was ready.
Elf x
I'm gonna check out those teats now - great idea. x