I have EBF Toby since he was born but we are now starting to introduce a bit of formula - at the moment it's just one bottle a day and I will continue to primarily BF for at least another month or so but anticipate in the next couple of months the amount of formula we give him will increase! I had a couple of Qs I was hoping people could help with please.

1. Sounds daft, but how do you know how much to give them? Admittedly while it's been at different times of the day, he has taken both 100ml and 200ml! I'm not sure if he will just take however much we offer, and don't want to offer too little or conversely, too much?! If it helps the 200ml was for the last feed of the day.

2. At the moment we are using pre-prepared bottles of formula as it's so easy and we aren't using so much that it gets very expensive. Might change in a few months time though. Would it be worth switching to powder and buying something like the perfect prep machine, or sticking to the pre prepared stuff as I guess once you take in to account the cost of the perfect prep machine the difference in cost may be negligible? Basically I am lazy, and want the quickest/easiest option but money a consideration too! 

Many thanks! :-)

In terms of volume I would just go by guidelines on packaging dependant on age/size. So just treat each FF as if he's fully FF. He'll leave it if he's not hungry.
I personally wouldn't bother with the perfect prep unless bottle feeding ff from the start but then both mine have been on prescription formula which needed cool water to make it up! Once you use more than one bottle a day is switch to powder

That's really helpful thank you :-)

wWHs....I used to make the amount up as per age on the packaging. I found O would only ever take what he wanted. When he began draining every bottle consistently or still appeared hungry we'd add an extra oz to his feed iyswim?

I never used a perfect prep and I ended up using formula from 3 days. It was easy enough to make to demand and I always had the premixed stuff in too just in case! The way I saw it the PP machine was a lot of money for what it was; and it was another thing to find a home for in our kitchen! X

Thanks Coco that is reassuring, T is a greedy guts and I vaguely remember reading somewhere that FF'd babies don't stop when they're full or something? Or is that because the person is feeding them? If so not really applicable as the little monkey was grabbing the bottle and shoving it back in his mouth when I took it away!

Good point about space in the kitchen too... ours is tiny, think H would kill me if I tried to fit another gadget in there!!

I definitely wouldn't bother buying a machine for the bottles. Not even sure I would if we were total FF. I find the powder really easy, and I was dreading the faff of it.

Agnes has 2.5 (or so) FF a day, rest is me. We are guided by what the tub says, but then I have a feel for 1) how much she's had off me the previous feed (sometimes not much, sometimes been on for ages), 2) whether she's a little bit sicky that day (really not a sicky baby at all, but I'd rather hold back on the formula and offer an easy top-up later than over feed on formula), 3) when she's slept/is due to sleep. At nearly 10 weeks the FF can be 2oz or 6oz.