[Grace Bellis]

I've started feeding breast milk to my girl in a bottle. Could someone pls tell me how do I know if my girl is getting eough? At the moment, I would pump out milk from one breast and give it to her in a feed. I'm doubtful with this approach because I've one breast which produce a lot more milk than the other one.

[barbwong_130]

If your baby is getting only breast milk the sure way to tell if she is getting enough milk is to count the number of wet nappies/diapers in 24 hours. For disposables you should be looking for at least six in 24 hours and for cloth ones at least eight. Your baby should also be gaining weight over a period of time and she should look health and have good skin tone. If your baby were younger than six weeks you would also look for at least two dirty nappies a day but after six weeks old anything from about 6 a day to one every two weeks can be normal.

It is actually very difficult to answer how much milk should a baby be drinking at a particular feed. Some babies like to have a lot of small feeds and other babies prefer a smaller number of larger feeds. Also it depends at what part of the day your baby likes to take in most of her milk.

My first baby only drank between 2 and 3 ounces during the 11 hours I was away from her. But she drank a lot and had lots of feeds during the evening and night. Someone suggested that she had reversed her day and night and maybe they were correct. Either way it was useful for me because I didn’t have to express that much milk for her but still she had 100% breast milk.

My second baby drank much more during the time I was away – maybe as much as 10 to 12 ounces. He didn’t feed as much when I was home. He was also bigger and fatter than my first child.

Usually it is suggested that at first you feed your baby in small amounts – maybe two-ounce lots. That way if the baby doesn’t want all the milk the most you are wasting is two ounces and if she needs more it is very easy to feed her a second (or even a third) two ounce lot of milk.

One thing to remember is that breastfed babies drink much less than formula fed babies. Formula milk is uniform and so always has the same number of calories per ounce. Thus with formula milk the only way to increase the number of calories the baby takes is to increase the amount of milk.

Breastfeeding doesn’t work like this. The number of calories the milk has changes with each feed. It changes thought out the feed, throughout the day and also as the baby grows older. So that a six-month-old baby who is still fully breastfed is drinking the same quantity of milk as she was when she was six weeks old.

Best wishes,
Barb