How much breastmilk for 5 month old weaning baby?

[cupcake1975]

Hi there,

I am new to the site and I'm wondering if anyone knows how many ounces per day my five month old baby should be having as a minimum?

I am currently weaning my Son and he is having pureed food 3 times per day: Breakfast, dinner and tea.  He will also have some breastmilk added in the porridge or pureed food.

At the moment he wakes up about 5-8 times per night where he breastfeeds but he is starting to feed less in the early hours of the morning and only feeds for about 5-10 minutes where he does feed.

I don't use formula milk and he has begun getting used to a bottle teat over the past month and will accept no more than 4ounces of expressed breastmilk at any one time. 

Can anyone offer any guidance? I'm thinking of introducing him on an EASY routine but I'm scared of refusing him breastmilk if he wants the boob inbetwwen meal times, many thanks

[MasynSpencerElliotte]

Hi there! Welcome to BW How many times does he currently feed in the day? That is a lot of solids meals at 5 months old...we did not get to 3 meals until 8/9 months or so. Up until one year their main nutrition should be breast milk or formula so if you find him nursing less and less I would want to cut back on solids. The frequent night feeds could be some reverse cycling where he tries to get in the calories he did not in the day. I cannot remember the exact recs here where I live but I think they are 24-32 oz per day??

A 5-10 min feed can be a full feed at this age as they get quite efficient and although he takes 4 oz from a bottle there is really no way to know what he gets from the breast - more you look that he is satisfied after the feed and happy to move on with his A time. As for starting EASY it is not a rigid schedule, so you can adapt it as suits and if an extra feed needs to happen so be it. With DD3 at this age we did more of an EAEAS routine!

[*Ali*]

19-32oz is normal with 25oz average for a 1-6mo. There is a great milk calculator on Kellymom but my phone isn't letting me paste the link right now for some reason.

I agree with Heidi that 3 meals a day at 5mo is possibly a little excessive and likely displacing milk feeds.

[MasynSpencerElliotte]

Thanks Ali...is this the one you were thinking of?

http://kellymom.com/bf/pumpingmoms/pumping/milkcalc/#calculator

[*Ali*]

Yes. Thanks.

[cupcake1975]

Thank you very much everyone,  I have cut back on the solid food to make sure he is having much more milk and I am now expressing more milk for him so I can continue to have a better idea of what he is eating too.  I'm going to post on the sleep board in a moment because he is still feeding every 2 hours

Thanks once again.