Battle: Burping and Bottle

Lydia suffers from hurty gas not all the time, but sometimes. It seems to be less when she is just breastfeeding, though there must be something I am eating that isn't helping things. I haven't eaten any beans which in my world is a feat. I have now eliminated onions and peppers which I love to see if that helps. The only two items that I love that I eat enough of to make a difference are tomatoes and chocolate. It could be dairy, but this is my primary source of protein since breastfeeding causes me to be starving all the time, I pile up on yogurt, milk, and cheese. The detailed food evaluation spins through my mind every time I am patting my daughter on the back and nothing comes out and nothing seems to come of it.

Since I have been pumping preparing for my return to work in January and helping her transition to other people giving her food, she has been taking a bottle. She is a professional bottle sucker. They say that babies that are breastfeed are such amazing suckers that bottles tend to be an easy task. Though there are some babies that never like the bottle at all and there are others that like it so much that they don't want to go back. Lydia is ambidextrous. She can do both (gifted I tell you, gifted!) The thing is that she is so efficient that she sucks it down in a fraction of the time it would take her to get feed otherwise. This particular talent does not help the battle to get her to burp. Matter of fact, it makes things worse.

Baby acrobatics occur after meal time because we sit her up, then down, then up, We place on her on our shoulders. We place her across our laps. We sit and pat her little back and the occasional monstrous belch is on leached a tremendous feeling of relief overwhelms us. I must admit that selfishly there are times that I spend less time doing the burping ritual than likely necessary because there are so few hours in the day.

We made sure that we were using slow flow newborn nipples. We have tried to force her to slow down by stopping after every single ounce. We have tried to change up the bottles. We tried the breastfeeding bottle by First Year and that just makes it worse because the milk gets suck in various levels. It is a gas making nightmare. We have tried the Avent bottles and gassy pain still comes. We have tried the Dr. Brown's less colic advertising bottle and it has not proven to be any more helpful. The gas drops have not been helpful as I would have liked them to be, though we have used them sparingly. Sigh.

In our less successful moments, she pleasantly flops over and sleeps.