Do babies follow the same feeding routines? My two babies had a similar pattern except my son at four months old had one less feed a day than my daughter had at the same age, but still gained weight and slept through the night.
The last article I wrote was about the routines I adopted when feeding our first born child. Since having Caleb I decided I would write an article outlining the routines that I found worked best for him.
Caleb was born 6 weeks prematurely so our main aim was not to get him into a routine but for him to gain weight. As with Amélie I have bottle fed him and used the same formula SMA for new borns.
Caleb was in hospital for the first 10 days of his life and was fed in the beginning 4 hourly and then the last couple of days on demand.
The routine did come pretty easily though as he seemed to want to be fed 4 hourly and this moved to three hourly when it was time for me to up the amount of formula that he was taking at a time. Looking at the chart in my previous article bottle feeding routines he was never that far off the quantities that I put in the chart when analysing Amélies feeding routine. I would say at the same age as indicated in the table he takes an ounce (30ml) less than she did. This routine was until he was about 10-12 weeks old. He never seemed to go above 7oz (210ml)
At 3 months old he dropped a feed in the night. He would take 7oz (210ml) at 3 feeds and 8oz (240ml) in the morning feed. Once again we have been lucky as he has only ever woken for his 4 hourly feeds but once he started taking 6oz (180ml) at every feed ( that seemed to be the magic quantity) he would have his last bottle at 18h30 and sleep through until anywhere between 6am and 7:30am. The difference between our baby boy and Amélie at this age was he took one feed less than Amélie. I used to wake Amélie up and give an extra feed around 22h30 and 1am.
I did not intend on dropping the late evening feed as he would wake up like clockwork for his 4 hourly feeds. One particular evening he did not wake up so I decided to leave him and see how long he would go. The time went from 4 hours to 5 that particular evening to 6 hours a couple of nights later and within two weeks when he was taking at least 24 -28 oz (720ml -840ml)per day he was sleeping a full 12 hours without waking. After speaking to midwives and health visitors they advised to let him sleep through as long as he was taking the milk during the day and steadily gaining the weight.
Caleb is about to be weaned. He is a week short of 6 months and still only taking 7oz (210ml) per feed (4 times a day) and lately he has been getting fussy and taking less so I am taking this to mean that he is ready to be weaned.
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