Baby nurses every 2-ish hours...he's almost 3 months old!

[jbeachwalker]

Hello, all! I need some advice from you wise people!
I started a bad habit (accidental parenting, if you will) of nursing my baby boy both when he wakes up from nap/bed and also before nap/bed. He is almost 12 weeks old and exclusively breastfed. I really want to get him on the EASY schedule, but don't know how to cut out that feeding before sleep when he truly seems hungry. He only nurses for 3-5 minutes at a time, just as my previous two sons did. I believe I have the overactive letdown where my milk sprays out quite forcefully during letdown and chokes them as newborns so they eat quickly? He's gotten used to the letdown and I don't think it's quite as forceful as it was in the beginning, but now we are stuck in this pattern. I worry my milk production is also accustomed to this eating every two hours.
Also, I don't 100% understand how the EASY schedule works out - for instance, if I nurse my son when he wakes up at 7am, let's say he nurses until 7:05am. Then he goes down for a nap at 8:45am. If he were to sleep for two hours, he'd wake at 10:45am and that would be well over 3 hours without feeding. Doesn't he need to eat every 3 hours at this point? I worry he won't sleep as well if his belly isn't full.
If anyone has words of wisdom and/or suggestions for what I can do to stop the nursing right before sleep, that would be great. It is now the way he gets sleepy enough for me to place him in the crib. Many, many thanks in advance!

[deb]

Hi and welcome!

I can't stay long, but a couple of things did leap out at me:

At 3 months, give or take, there's a HUGE growth spurt, and two things happen about then: milk supply adjusts AND babies become more efficient nursers. What used to take 40+ minutes can happen in 5-10 minutes around now for many babies.

1:45 might be a bit long of an A time for now; are you watching for sleepy cues? I only ever got 90-minute naps out of mine, barring illness, so 90 minutes up and 90 minutes down at 3 months gave us a 3-hour EASY.

When he nurses before naps, does he take a full feed, or just use the nursing to put himself to sleep? Will he take a pacifier/dummy/soother instead of the breast? Have you tried something like playing quietly with him in his room in dim light after maybe an hour of A time to see is he can be wound down more gently without a feed? When I tried just not leaving the room for the first A time of the day at this age, I found it was easy to get my DD to the point where instead of being wired and cranky, she was mellow and quiet to the point where she fell asleep fairly readily w/o needing to nurse (altho I did for a while - we had other issues going on then and needed to ADD a snack for a week or two). It also meant I was able to observe her sleepy cues much more closely. Might be worth a try.

[FPT23]

Following as I had the same questions in one of my posts! Your not alone xoxoxoxo

[Tabathagucci]

Following also!