Skip to main content

Stretching her Schedule

About a week ago, I started noticing that she wasn't eating well if I fed her on her regular schedule. For about 1 month to 6 weeks, we'd been following the feeding schedule below:

7:30am
10:30am
1:30pm
4:30pm
6:30pm

But about a week ago, if I fed her at 3 hrs, she would maybe nurse for a minute or 2 and then just be totally distracted by everything around her. I tried everything to get her interested in nursing at that point, but nothing working. I'd usually just wait another 30 minutes and try to feed her again and she'd finally eat well when it had been 3.5 hours since her last feeding. So this made me think it was time to try to stretch her schedule.

Although I've been doing Babywise, I've never really had to MAKE her go longer to get a feeding. She started out about 2.5-3 hours everyday, then as she got older, I noticed the same thing as above and would move to offering a feeding around every 3 hours. So now she seems to be ready to go longer. I started trying a couple of days ago and it's worked great! She is never fussy in between feedings and she regularly gets hungry at about 3.5 hours. So here is what she's done the last couple of days:

Thursday:
7:20am
11:15am
3:00pm
6:30pm

Friday:
7:40am
11:00am
2:40pm
4:45pm
7:00pm

Saturday:
8:20am
12:00pm
3:10pm
6:50pm

So as you can see, I'm going by her cues at this point. When I stretch her schedule, I take about a week to stretch just by a little bit each time and see when she's hungry. A couple of times in the past couple of days she's gone 4 hours. Partly because I've had to run errands or do things and I couldn't get back home to feed her within 3.5 hours. BUT she was never fussy. She actually hasn't cried before a feeding in weeks! So she's clearly ready to stretch. She's still having regular poops & pees. And she's content & sleeping well, so I'm going to try to work out a regular schedule next week.

Any scheduling moms have any tips? I like feeding her at 7:30am. It works great for us. And I usually feed her at 6:30pm, but I could probably do 7:00pm. I'm just trying to figure out how to work it all out where it's regular. She does best when things are consistent day to day, so I need to figure it out.

Comments

Jennifer said…
this is related to your other post but i have heard that a lot of breastfeeding mom's totally skip the rice cereal part and wait until 6 months to introduce solids. At 4 months i think it's hard for them to eat it out of a spoon and since you nurse you would have to be constantly giving it to her in a bottle mixed with breastmilk which i don't think is ideal for breastfeeding moms. My nephew started on rice cereal mixed with his formula at 4 months and he loves it, but they tried it first with a spoon and it was a disaster!
Cameron said…
I have been thinking about that as well - how to feed the rice cereal since I'm breastfeeding. I still think I want to start that for at least a week before I start other solid foods - just to get her digestive system prepared. But I'm going to talk to my pediatrician more about it when we go in on the 12th. Because I also had heard that it wasn't totally necessary to do rice cereal first. We'll see what he says! This was my initial plan just based on my own research, but my dr. may say the same thing - that her digestive system can handle the "real" stuff right away! I'll let you know - you know I'll be posting about it. LOL

Popular posts from this blog

10 on Tuesday: 10 Favorite 6 Month Pics

This is completely gratuitous, just me posting pictures of Isis, but my friend Hannah took some pictures of our family yesterday! She is such a great photographer & she is also going to be watching Isis for me in the fall when I start my student teaching. I feel so blessed to have her as a friend on top of the fact that she takes gorgeous pictures of Isis!! I also realized that I didn't put any of the ones where she is smiling in this post. This just means I'll have to post more another time! Get excited! (And this is not a great comment-grabbing post , but who cares? This is for the digital baby book!) Check out the 10 on Tuesday blog Read my other 10 on Tuesday posts

How to Efficiently Read Blogs

Have you ever been just completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blogs out there you can read? I have. Wow. So many fabulous people I'm interested in reading about! I love the stories, the humor, the pictures, the tips, the giveaways, the links, I just love it all! So I've found myself having to streamline my blog reading in order to better manage my time & make sure I hit the "must-reads" for me. Here's how I've done it: First of all, if you leave a comment on my blog or if you follow my blog, I will go to your blog & at the very least I will follow you on Google Friend Connect . This way the blog shows up on my blogger dashboard when I log in. I always look over the new posts that are there when I log in each day, but if you've looked at my Google Friend Connect page lately, you'll see that I follow a lot of people's blogs! So I had to come up with a more specific approach in addition to the blogger dashboard. This is where my Goog...

10 on Tuesday: 10 Favorite TV Shows

This will later lead into my 30 Days of Television posts coming up in August, but these are my 10 Favorite TV Shows that are currently on the air! They are not in any order. Grey's Anatomy Bones House The Vampire Diaries One Tree Hill The Big Bang Theory Gossip Girl Cougar Town Modern Family Glee What are your 10 favorite TV shows currently on the air? Previous 10 on Tuesday posts