My 6 week old DD is constantly falling asleep while nursing. She is a lazy eater and nursing has always taken ages but now its just getting ridiculous. After 5 min of sucking she will fall asleep, I manage to wake her up (diaper change, strip her down a little, burp her), she sucks a few times and is off to sleep again.... this goes on for an hour. By that time my breasts are hurting and I end up giving her a bottle of BM, which she gulps down so I can see she in hungry. I'm worried that with every bottle she is closer to refusing the breast altogether but the only other alternative is to let her sleep and snack.
This whole process has me in tears. She got formula for the first few days as my milk was slow to come in after a c-section and getting her to breastfeed was hard work and a lot of stress, now every time I have to give her a bottle it's like all that was for nothing
She has a strange way of feeding because she nurses on the breast for 5-10 min and then I have to put on a nipple shield when the flow slows down (same on both sides). It's not the most convenient thing but it works for her so I have adjusted.
I have no idea what changed because she was doing fine for the last 5 weeks, with 1 bottle at the DF and all the rest of the feeds at the breast.
We have her on a 3h easy, tanking up at 4,6 and 8pm, DF at 11:00 (bottle of breast milk) and she sleeps 5h straight after that. After the 5h break, at 4am she still manages to feed normally but from 7am it's back to the same thing.
It's starting to depress me - all these women all around the world manage to breastfeed and I can't get it right, it makes me feel like such a failure....