Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Ivy's Feeding Upsets - Solved! (Mostly)

It's not food intolerance, and it's not reflux.

At her checkup a few weeks ago, the paediatrician suggested that her late-in-the-feed upsets might be heartburn. To deal with that, we tried giving Ivy a dose of Losec every day. It didn't seem to do anything.

At about the same time, I was posting questions on the Australian Breastfeeding Association forum. This forum is full of Austrlian women chatting about breastfeeding. I staretd out asking for opinions on whether Ivy's behaviour fitted the pattern of food intolerance or reflux, and I got lots of interesting answers, but nothing particularly convincing. Then I looked in the "Breast Refusal" section.

In this section, other women described their babies doing eactly what Ivy does. They discovered that their babies were simply extremely fast feeders, who got annoyed when they were still on the breast once they had finished!

So it turns out that Ivy can happily drain my breast in five minutes, and is then completely over the idea of feeding. None of this "non-nutritive sucking" for her!

She now sometimes cries a little at the end of a feed, but nothing like before. We are all a lot happier!

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