A few months ago if you asked me if I thought that I would be talking all about poop just a wee bit down the road...I would have thought "no". But, here I am in a new corner of reality, and I find myself talking about poop. A lot. When people ask me how my daughter is doing...I manage to turn the conversation into something about reflux, poop, constipation, gas, or some other ridiculous thing. Not: "she is amazing and wonderful and already reciting the alphabet while crawling around the living room in search of some intellectual knowledge". Nope. I talk about poop.
See, breastmilk caused her discomfort...made the reflux worse. So, she was irritable and colicky. But her poops were frequent. Yellow and seedy. Just as they were supposed to be. Then we tried formula for reflux babies. It did help with some of the reflux issues. But, the pooping stopped. It only occured every other day. And? It meant that while trying to poop there were lots of moments of discomfort, red in the face straining, and sheer unhappiness. For the baby, of course. And the poop? It was thicker and much more abundant at one time. The irritability was pretty bad, so we changed formula. We went with a more "gentle" formula that is supposed to be broken down further and hence is more easily digestible. The result? Thus far...poops more often, poops with less straining, and poops more like "breastmilk poops". Isn't this all just fascinating?
To me it is, because the more my baby poops, and the less she strains, the happier she is. Yesterday she actually was awake for almost four hours at one stretch, and she didn't cry non-stop for the whole four hours. She cried some, sure...but there were glimpses of a calm and content baby in there that I hadn't seen for quite some time. Leading up to this day and this blissful four hour stretch of some sort of contentedness...I had threatened to duct tape the pacifier to Finnley's face to keep it in her mouth. The pacifier "plugs the hole", as I call it...and keeps her quiet and relatively calm. She spits it out ALL THE TIME, though...so, it is not "reliable" in its mission. I was just trying to make it more reliable. That is all.
Is that wrong?
Well, maybe.
Let's hope the new formula keeps helping. For all of our sakes!
