Bottle or breast, logged the same way.

Most homes end up with two feeding records without meaning to. Breast feeds get remembered as minutes. Bottles get remembered as millilitres. Put them side by side and they do not add up, because they were never measuring the same thing.

That is a problem the moment feeding stops being one thing. A top-up after a slow feed. Expressed milk in a bottle so the other parent can take a night. Formula from week six. Most families do some mix of these at some point, and the record has to survive it.

What each one actually measures

A breast feed has a start, a side and a duration. You cannot see how much went in, and no amount of staring at the clock changes that. A bottle has a start, what was in it and how much came out of it. A pumping session has a side and a volume, but it is not a feed at all, it is supply.

Those are three different shapes of information. The mistake is forcing them into one, usually by turning minutes on the breast into a guessed number of millilitres so it can sit next to the bottle. The guess then gets treated like a measurement.

What they have in common

Time. Every feed, however it happened, has a moment it started and a gap before the next one. That gap is the thing you are actually asking about at 3am. Not "was it breast or bottle" but "how long ago, and is it too soon to offer again". The gaps between feeds, the number of feeds in a day and the evening clump you read about in the feeding rhythm post all show up the same way whether the feed came from a breast or a bottle.

So the log should be one list, in time order, with the feed type as a detail on each entry rather than a reason for a separate notebook. One column of when. What happened at each when is written next to it.

What is worth noting

Less than you fear, and not the same things for each type.

For a breast feed, the side. Left, right or both. Not because the minutes matter to the decimal, but because the next feed usually starts on the other side, and at 4am nobody remembers which one that was.

For a bottle, what was in it. Breast milk, formula, later cow's milk or water. This is the one detail a midwife or health visitor will ask about that a tired memory reliably gets wrong. "Was that a formula top-up or expressed milk?" has a real answer, and the log should hold it.

For any feed, the odd ones. A feed refused, a feed that ended in a full spit-up, a bottle that took forty minutes when it usually takes ten. These belong in a note on the entry, in your own words, not in a separate list you will lose.

What to ignore

Whether one breast feed was fourteen minutes and the next was nineteen. Whether the bottle was 90 or 95 millilitres. Whether today's total on the breast, in minutes, is "less" than yesterday's total in the bottle, in millilitres. That last one is not a comparison. It is two units pretending to be one, and it is the source of a surprising amount of worry.

This is also why Little Bean logs a breast feed as time and a bottle as volume and leaves it there. Tap a breast feed on a chart and you get what you entered. The app does not invent a millilitre figure to sit next to the bottles, because a health number nobody typed is not data, however tidy it looks.

Mixed feeding, without the ledger

The place two records hurt most is the top-up. Breast for fifteen minutes, then a 40 millilitre bottle because the baby was still rooting. Written in two places, that becomes "a short breast feed" in one and "a small bottle" in the other, and neither reads as what it was: one meal, in two parts, at 21:40.

Logged in one list, the two entries sit next to each other and read as one event. Anyone looking later, you at breakfast or your partner taking the next stretch, sees the shape without having to reconstruct it. That is most of what a shared log is for. If you have not read it yet, the 3am handover is about exactly that moment, and why the facts should already be on the other side before anyone whispers a question.

The same log, whatever you decide

How you feed your baby will change, possibly more than once, and often not for the reasons you planned. The record should not have an opinion about that. It does not rank one method over the other, and it does not start a new page when you switch. A feed is a feed. It has a time, a type and, where one exists, an amount.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the plans page explains what each Little Bean plan includes.

If your baby is refusing feeds, feeding far less than usual, producing noticeably fewer wet diapers, or you are worried about supply or weight, talk to your midwife, health visitor or doctor. A clear log helps you describe the last day accurately; a professional is the person to act on it. Nothing here is medical advice.