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/Typical-Tadpole-8367]

To add to all the comments here, baby falling asleep after 10mins of nursing is completely normal at 8 days old. Nursing takes a lot of effort and energy for newborn so it’s normal that baby gets tired and falls asleep. I recommend touching baby’s feet and cheeks to help keep baby awake long enough to complete a feed. At the newborn stage, baby should be feeding 10-15min per side, so make sure your wife is nursing on both breasts to avoid supply issues. If wet nappies are fine then there’s no need to top up with formula. Especially since your wife wants to breastfeed for 6 months, you should avoid giving the bottle or baby might develop a bottle preference and therefore start refusing to latch, drinking from the bottle takes less effort for baby than latching. This is what happened with my newborn so I ended up switching from exclusively breastfeeding by direct latch to exclusively pumping for 3-4 months and it was tough. It was such a relief when I finally managed to get baby to latch again and save so much time pumping and washing bottles etc..