I know there has been a couple of other posts about this recently but I was wondering how easy it is to breast feed your baby and suppliment this with the odd bottle feed of formula milk?

I plan to breast feed & express milk if I can so my partner can do an occasional night feed or take care of LO if I go out but I've heard this can be time consuming and you don't get much milk to bottle feed really unless you want to be sitting their expressing for ages. I've also heard that breast feeding needs to be well established before you can combine the two. How long does this take? I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried to combine the two.

Quite truthfully, I don't know when you can start to do both.

But from experience, I would do it as soon as you are allowed. I didn't in my first pregnancies and I had a heck of a time trying to get my babies on bottles. This time around, I will be getting the baby on a bottle as soon as possible.

Plus, my hubby felt left out with my first two. Also it was somewhat hard on me as I had a newborn and an 18 month old. I could only feed the baby and felt like I was sitting for hours in one day breastfeeding. I think my 18 month old felt left out (attention wise) and didn't get much attention as she probably should have. It would have been so much easier had the baby been on a bottle.

I started off on formula as Alfie wouldn't take to the breast initially but after he did, I did both. I would mainly BF at night time unless my bbs needed relieving during the day. Sadly this only went on for 3 weeks as Alfie got a bad cold and put pay to the BF for 3 weeks and he never latched on again

It takes around a month (roughly) for your milk to become established, and in order to do this properly, you should exclusively BF during this time in order to build the supply to be enough to give a growing baby a full feed at each feed. x

Expressing's not that time consuming, it takes me about 10-15 mins to get a good 3 oz. I use a hand pump

Hiya. I think the key is getting a good quality pump. I've read that you shouldn't buy the pump from a company that makes formula b/c they tend to be low quality. I also heard Medela is a good brand. Oftentimes you can find them on ebay for relatively cheap. People have also told me that you should rent one first.

With Rachel it was after a month the first time I went out and had to express. Looking back I did find expressing difficult sometimes, but I used to try and build up a stock in advance and freeze it so I wasn't rushing to express before I went out.
I've heard the electric pumps are better, but not sure, I used the hand pump.
xx