On more of a “tips and tricks” note, we made some interesting progress. Hope it sticks.
After talking to so many of our friends and listening to their struggles. It seemed that many people at around our stage all transition off breastfeeding for a couple reasons…
- Pumping in the middle of the night (about 2am) is not easy to keep up.
- The baby starts to eat more as she grows, a lot more!
So Naturally we started to freak out a little thinking we were going to run out of milk for Maya. …somewhat determined and carrying the lessons of the past we tried to make it work and started experimenting.
- Pumping more frequently… because most of the time the baby does not drain the breast milk completely, but the pump does.
- More breast milk (inside babies stomach) = more sleep for us!🙂 So here are a couple realizations…
- We figured out why putting the baby to sleep early helps her to sleep better through the night from this article (How to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night), or at least one of the reasons… When we start to put her down between 6-8pm, she is more awake to eat more!
- Before when we kept her up late until about 10pm! (please don’t judge us! we’re learning) thinking she would be more tired, it turned out that she fell asleep while feeding, which we naively thought was a good thing, NOT! so she didn’t fill her belly.
- It turns out the calculation at the moment works out to something like, 1oz of breastmilk = 1 hour of sleep. We were quite amazed when she downed over 5 oz of milk, since in the past she has only been drinking about 4 max. She’s been increasing her intake pretty rapidly lately.
- A couple things needed to be in-line of course before this could work. Her stomach needed to grow a little so that she could fit it all in there and she also has been able to start passing gas without too much discomfort.
UPDATE! [04-29-2012] The following days have proven this not to work 100% of the time. We are testing this in combination with some additional information acquired from “the 90 minute baby” author which suggests napping more throughout the day and getting to sleep as early as 6-7pm will let her sleep through the night better. I will keep you updated.