One Month Old

1 month old

Mommy and Lilly taking a break from eating to burp

We had to change her jammies because she got all wet from the leaking bottle.

I can't believe that on the 17th Lilly was a month old. It seems like just yesterday I was in the hospital having her. Its amazing how much she has changed in the last month. She is now much more alert during the day and is sleeping between 4-51/2 hours in between feedings, and actually last night she slept from 9pm-3:30am. I think that she was just really tired, so we aren't counting on that to happen again anytime soon. I also think that she is getting ready to start smiling. You can tell that she is thinking about it and sometimes she will give us a half grin. I think that any day she will show us her precious smile. When she was born she was only drinking an ounce, now she is drinking between 4 and 5 ounces, which seems like so much to me because she is still so small.

Recently I had been wondering if Lilly had Reflux (GERD). After speaking with the Dr. yesterday he seemed to think that she did. However, I am still not convinced. She shows some signs of having relfux, but she doesn't spit up, which is the biggest indication. Her pediatrician recommended putting .5 tsp of Mylanta and 1 tsp of Rice in her bottles. I really did not want to put rice in her bottles, and didn't the first couple times. However, last night she seemed really uncomfortable when she ate so I decided to try it in hopes that it would help her. The rice seemed to help a little, but I was still not sold on it. This morning, I put the rice and mylanta in her bottle and was hoping to see an improvement today. She did fine at first, but then I realized she wasn't getting much out of the nipple (because the formula is now thicker and has a hard time fitting through the hole) so I took a needle and made the nipple larger, like our pediatrician suggested. Well...after making the nipple larger she started screaming again. I think I made it too big and she was getting too much milk too fast which made her mad and made her belly hurt. This is the same problem we were having with the AVENT nipples before I thickening her formula with Rice. Now I am starting to wonder if she doesn't have Reflux, and if she just had a harder time sucking/swallowing because she was getting too much formula and air out of the AVENT nipples. I think today I am going to stop using the Mylanta and Rice, and go out and buy the Dr. Brown's BPA Free bottles and see if they work better for her. I think this will help me determine whether the bottle/nipple is the problem and is causing her tummy pain or if she really has reflux. This will be the 4th bottle we have tried in 4 weeks. We started out using the original AVENT bottles for the first couple days, but then learned of the BPA scare, and was told by our pediatrician not to use them. So we switched to the Playtex Nurser with the drop-ins. Her feedings started taking an hour because the playtex nipples were really slow and Lilly was sucking so hard to get anything out she was collapsing the nipple. Then, I found the AVENT Tempo bottles with the drop-ins, which are BPA free. They use the same AVENT nipples so I was excited about that because I had a lot of them. However, Lilly had learned to suck so hard with the Playtex nipples that the AVENT nipples are now too fast for her. It runs all out of her mouth and spills all over her. She chokes and has a hard time swallowing to keep up with the flow of the nipple. I hope soon we can find a bottle/nipple/formula that works for her and makes feedings more pleasant for her!!