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Hi Sandie

Firstly all credit to you for trying to re-initiate breastfeeding !

You need to be really patient and really easy on yourself. It will take time to get your baby back on the breast and its sooo important that you do not give yourself a hard time when things are difficult or if you feel things are not progressing as quickly as you would like. A weekend session in bed with baby is an excellent idea...even if your daughter wont latch on she will love the skin to skin bonding experience so much! What kind of bottle are you feeding with? I am in the UK so I don't know if you will have the same bottle types that we do but there is an excellent bottle for breastfeeding mums called a haberman feeder. Alot of babies who are mixed fed favour the bottle because the milk just glugs down their throat whereas with the breast they have to actively extract the milk by sucking. With a haperman feeder the baby has to use the same sucking action and pressure to get the milk out of the bottle (hence they stop favouring it out of pure laziness).

Babies are most likely to accept the breast over the bottle if you dont wait until they are hungry...is she is due a feed at 1pm and she starts getting cranky ready for it at 12.45 then I would suggest you try offering her the breast at 12.15 or 12.30.....even if all she does is suckle for 5 mins she is then stimulating your breast to hopefully produce milk. How are you getting on with expressing? (remember that stress can make it very hard/almost impossible to pump and also pumping doesnt give you a reliable indication of how much milk you have). Make sure you keep topping her up with formula/expressed milk until she is ready to make the transition (should you get adequate milk supply) to exclusive breast feeding.

My email address is siobhanhavis@aol.com .... please feel free to email me anytime oh and I am on facebook too if you want to look me up (siobhan Havis).

xx Siobhan xx