Hi,
My LO will be 12 weeks tomorrow. We have always had a hard time bottle feeding her EBM. She spent sometime in the NICU when she was born, so was bottlefed there from the start. Even there, the nurses had a hard time getting a good amount in her, which caused them to not want to release her to us even though everything checked out ok. After we got her home, she took to the breast very well (except for some latch issues in the 1st weeks and falling asleep easily at the breast). We continued bottlefeeding her once a day at the recommendation of her pediatrician. This bottlefeeding has always been the worst feeding of the day. We were lucky to get 2 oz in, and then she would be extremely hungry in about an hour. Now that I'm back at work (past week and a half), this problem seems to be compounded. I bf her in the morning, and all evening feeds, which consists of the pre-bedtime, the dreamfeed and the middle of the night feeds. She gets 3 bottles during the day every 3 hours. At first the nanny was only able to get just 1 oz in, and now we've worked up to 2 oz. at a time, and then she stops and wants nothing to do with it. However, she then has a hard time sleeping and takes to sucking her thumb or pacifier very vigorously (instead of the normal sucking to help her fall asleep) and crying in spurts. The nanny will give her the bottle back and she will inhale an oz and then fall asleep, although these post bottlefeeding naps are not solid naps, meaning she'll wake up fairly frequently, instead of the deep slumber she's able to achieve after she's bf. She sometimes will also not sleep very long and waking up for a 2 oz feed within 2 hours of the last feed.
I'm at my wit's end. Going back to work is already hard enough and knowing that she has very erratic feedings constantly weighs on my mind. When she was bf, she was gaining 1 oz a day. Now that the bottle feedings have started, that growth has slowed to 1/2 oz a day, which the pediatrician was a bit concerned about, but was hopeful that she would take to the bottle better after awhile and increase the weight gain rate again. As you may have seen in my other posts, we've tried all sorts of bottles and nipples thinking that was the problem. We are now on Dr. Brown's wide neck and using a level 1 MAM nipple - she hated the Dr. Brown's nipple and the MAM bottle was giving her a lot of gas so we've combined the 2. We tried the level 2 MAM nipple on the Dr. Brown's bottle but it was coming out too fast for her (when we were using the MAM bottle, the level 2 nipple was fine).
Has this happened to other people? Is this just a time issue, meaning nature will take its course eventually? Is a 2 oz or 3 oz EBM feed normal or too little for her age? Any other thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you.
