Unexpected Bright Side

Gabriel and I got sick last weekend. At least, I assume he and I had the same thing: stomach bug. Ick. Anyway, the result was that we took him off food for a day and fed him just Pedialyte and then slowly worked him back onto food. First plain breastmilk, slowly increasing the volumes, then breastmilk fortified to 22 calories, and finally breastmilk fortified to 24 calories. I guess I need to go back a week, though, and tell you that his spit-up episodes were starting to get really bad again. Half the feed would come back up at almost every meal. I was about to lower his meal volume when he got sick. What we discovered is that he can tolerate about 130mL volume per feed (he was previously at 140mL) and that he does okay on 22-calorie, but 24-calorie milk resulted in spit-up/vomit at most meals. So, we have settled onto 130mL of 22-calorie milk and we have had no significant spit-up for two days now. It's such a nice change. The dietician won't be super happy with me because she wants him on 24-calorie milk with a bigger volume than he's getting, but my thinking is that keeping more volume down on a lower calorie diet is better than being on a higher calorie diet and routinely losing half of it.

It also seems to have uncovered another problem. Maybe we're seeing this now because he's not losing half his milk right away, but he's started throwing up 30-60 minutes after eating. Not all the time, but we at least will generally hear a raspy "there's something in my throat" cough around that time frame. We are thinking he may have a mild reflux issue.We just didn't notice before because of the massive spit-ups. He has a GI appointment next week, so we'll definitely bring that up.

He has also started spoon feeding this week! Well, it's actually more like finger painting, but given that the bottle is still a trial and tribulation, it's nice to be doing something different with food. We just give him a little bit of cereal to play with and then put a little in his mouth with the spoon if he happens to have an open mouth. Hopefully over the next month or so he'll get the idea.

If you're on Facebook, Thomas took a bunch of photos of Gabriel's introduction to solid food with a wonky digital camera. It resulted in some interesting photo effects, but you'll still get the idea.