i was having a hard time keeping up with our little guy’s demands too. and it was totally stressing me out… which i think we all probably know is a vicious cycle to lowering one’s supply. i finally saw the light when i decided to try mixing my breast milk and formula. i know some may disagree with this, but it’s working for us. i nurse in the mornings and evenings, but while he’s away at school, he gets bottles. those bottles all contain 4 oz breast milk and 2 oz of formula. little dude takes them like a champ. so my advice? maybe try disguising the formula with your breast milk. best of luck mama!

When Teagan hit around 8 mths we had to start supplementing a little bit. I couldn’t keep up pumping. I was literally pumping for the next day and at one point it wasn’t enough. So, we started supplementing. Instead of doing whole bottles of formula I would mix in the formula with the bottles she took at daycare. This seemed to work better then a whole bottle. Good luck!

I have a friend whose preemie baby needed to gain weight, and the doctors told her breast milk wasn’t going to give him everything he needed to put on weight as rapidly as they wanted. Their solution was to mix breast milk and formula half and half until he was a few months old, and then gradually they are taking the formula out of his bottles. I know your situation is different, but maybe mixing the formula with breast milk will help Arlo too. Maybe split one bottle of breast milk between two formula bottles at first, and then gradually increase the amount of formula into one of the bottles over a few weeks/month or so.

Have you tried giving it to him from a straw? I’m pretty sure my girls were able to drink from A straw at 8 months. or try different bottles, or even a soppy cup.

try to give it to him out of something other than a bottle. try sippy cups or i have had the best luck with the tommee tippee cups with straws. try it warm, cold, and room temperature. try mixing it with breastmilk so its mostly breastmilk. you could also try to make your own baby food and thin it out by using formula instead of breastmilk. that worked really well for my daughter. and dont give up, he has to get used to the taste of it so just keep trying it, and hopefully he will eventually start to develop a taste for it.

I know you say you’ve tried supplements, but I belong to a support group for women with low supply, and many swear by the recs in these books: Motherfood and Making More Milk, both available on Amazon. Also, you could look into donor milk instead of formula, on sites such as Eats on Feets for Human Milk for Human Babies. Good luck!

Mixing breast milk and formula to start should help. Go very slow and he might not notice. Use a sweet formula like Similac, or try a drop or two of agave if you are using organic.

I gave my daughter 3different types of formula and she loved Similac.it doesn’t have that iron/metal taste/smell like the other formulas do.

10 oz between 9 and 5 is not bad..my 8 month old was drinking four 6 oz bottles a day- one in morning, one at lunch, one at about 4pm and one before bed. So if he’s on a 6 oz bottle, he’s just 2 oz shy…could you add 1 oz of formula to the 5 oz to make 6? It sounds like he’s just comfort nursing throughout the night, as a 2 oz deficit isn’t that much during the day to warrant nursing all night?

My soon-to-be 1 year old daughter never took to formula from a bottle; she would gag every time. (To be fair, I did try the formula and it tastes of metal. At first I thought there was something wrong until I tried two other brands and it was the same.) I tried Enfamil and Good Start and both with no luck (I hate having huge containers of it opened and no where to go!). I did have better results with the liquid Similac organic; she would maybe drink 4 ounces at one sitting. All the books said she needed x ounces of milk/formula and as I was nursing, it was really impossible for me to know how much she was getting. And I know when I pumped, I didn’t get more than 3-5 ounces at a time.

If your son is having cereal and you’re worried about total ounces, I would add the formula to his rice/oatmeal/barley. That’s a good way to sneak in more ounces.

My doctor never seemed concerned with her needing more milk. And she was continually on the smaller side of the growth charts. I really wasn’t a fan of formula because it tasted nothing like breast milk (yes, I’ve tried) and had that awful metal taste. I didn’t want to use it, even in her cereal, and my doctor said she was fine. He never made it seem like I really had to supplement or else.

The above ideas of mixing is something I wish I tried though, again, I did have some real problems with the formula itself. So maybe I never really gave it too much of a real chance.

Lastly, if you want to try to increase your milk output, have you tried the organic tea Mother’s Milk? I used that as well as kelp pills (something about the iodine that is supposed to be good for nursing output). Both seemed to help my milk supply.

my baby is 8 month old too and i was always worrying if she got enough breastmilk, i pumped for quite some time at night to store milk for the next day but it was always just 80ml or so, she drank the whole day so there was no point in pumping during the day, since she started to eat solids i just stopped worrying, she has always been healthy, never under weight (right at the average mark) so why worry?
you have to consider that your milk always changes, once your baby starts to eat solids the content of your milk adapts so you may produce less but still have enough nutrients in it for your baby, if you are worrying about hydration give him some water or unsweetened tee with his solids, that should be enough to keep him hydrated and his stool soft
i have to say i wouldn’t go cold turkey and leave my still breastfeeding baby for 4 days, he obviously still needs you very much and makes up for lost time during the night (drinking a lot during the night doesn’t only have to mean that he needs your milk but also just you), even if he starts taking bottles leaving him for that long will be a HUGE and very sudden adjustment
i would also contact your local la leche league leader and talk to her for guidance, good luck

Try mixing the formula with breast milk, a little more each time. My daughter would only drink Similar organic (with the green lid) and I did a taste test – it tasted better, sweeter – more like mommy’s milk! It was the ONLY kind she would drink. It has organic cane sugar in it.

I work outside the home and my 10-month-old daughter won’t take any brand of formula either. At 9 months, our pediatrician recommended adding whole milk yogurt and cheese to her diet. It satisfies her and has helped take some of the pressure off me to pump. We just make sure she hydrates with water in her sippy cup during the day.

Someone suggested goats milk to me when I was weaning my daughter instead of formula. Have you read into this? It is more identical to breast milk then cows milk or formula.

Start mixing some formula in with breast milk. I started with half an ounce to an ounce of formula with 3-4 oz of breast milk. They can barely taste it and then I just started to increase it gradually. The pediatrician said that was fine to mix them together. :)

We tried the half breast milk and half formula and it worked very well. Now my 9 month old has 2 full formula bottles a day while at work and I nurse the rest of the time- no more pumping- yay! We also really like the formula we are using, its organic and the only one on the market that is not corn syrup based but brown rice sweetened- Babys Only. We use the soy kind but I know they have dairy. Its on the pricey side but my baby just chugs it down and is helping me tremendously. Hope this helps!

Seeing your baby refuse to eat is so stressful and all mom’s go through it eventually. It’s unfortunate that some women have chosen to judge you when you’re clearly asking for ideas. Who has the right to decide when another mom’s child should be sleep training or eating table food? These time lines and techniques aren’t for everyone. Didn’t we all learn that if we don’t have something nice to say, we shouldn’t say anything at all? Anyway, that being said I would suggest the same thing some of the other moms have said. Half breast milk and half formula worked great for our son when my supply started to slow down around the 8 month mark. I also noticed he preferred the organic similac brand over any of the others. Good luck, I hope you’re able to find something that works.

Hey love..

I didn’t read all the comments, but Scarlett had the same reaction to soy formula.. It was so tramatic, I thought she was dying.. She got so exhausted.. pale, limp and unresponsive. :-/

We waited a few months before trying another option. When we’re apart, date night or such, the grandparents have had success giving her any of the Similac formulas.

I’m not sure how to correct the opposite eating behavior. Scarlett is pretty bad at sleeping at night and wants to eat every few hours.. I am pretty sure it started when she started to teeth.. So ya.. She hasn’t slept through the night in 5 months.

My only guess for accepting formula is ratio mix it with the breast milk.. Mostly breast milk in the beginning and then mostly formula in that one bottle.

Good luck <3<3

<3xojo