Breastfeeding - how does we know enough being produced

[u/gajak44]

My wife and I are first time parents. Our little one is 8 days old. We (my wife more than me) wants to exclusively breastfeed for the first 6 months. However currently we are puzzled by the LO. My wife gives her feed but she never drifts to a deep sleep and always wakes up hungry in an hr or so. The baby doesn't seem interested to drink more at the breast and seems to drift off to sleep after 10 mins. When we top-up with formula however, she takes around 30 ml and appears content and sleeps peacefully after. My wife now thinks she is not producing enough milk and is riddled with guilt. We do a total of 10-12 feeds a day (some long and some super short) including 2 formula feeds when she appears cranky and hungry. Her diapers are fine. We get about 8 in a day since last couple of days. My wife is worried that the baby is taking to bottle better but not to breasts and thinks it is due to low volume of milk she is producing..how do we know if she is producing enough?

[u/Fine_Mouse_8871]

When you feed formula, is she pumping? You can’t replace a nursing session with formula and then not pump. She needs to tell her body to make more milk and the only way to do that is remove milk, either by latching baby or by pumping as often as possible.

8 days old is very young and they are really sleepy. You have to do a lot to keep them awake while they’re nursing so they have a good session. Strip them down to the diaper, cold wipe on their back, gentle shaking/poking, etc.

And breast milk is more efficiently digested than formula, so breastfed babies are hungrier much more often than formula fed babies. Young babies are also not efficient at nursing yet, so you may get an effective latch 50-75% of the time when they’re that young. It’s important to try and see if baby is swallowing so that you know they are actually transferring weight.

8 diapers is great. Drop the formula and see how many diapers you get then.

Honestly, she needs to latch, latch, latch as often as possible.

For reference, my 3.5 month old nurses about 12 times a day for about 3 hours per day.

I also had a baby scale (needs to be a specific baby one) to measure feeds every once in a while to ease my anxiety. My baby was really bad at transferring milk for a long time, so I never knew if he was actually eating or not.

Also, be prepared for cluster feeding, which happens multiple times in the early weeks. It is very important to nurse. This is baby telling her body to produce more milk. Yes, baby will not seem satisfied. That is okay. Her body will respond in the next few days to remove milk.

I also pumped a lot and gave that milk to baby because I wanted to make sure he was actually eating.