Does it sound like my baby is intolerant?

[Sephy]

My baby (6wo) is usually pretty happy and calm and her skin appears to be fine apart from a very sore bottom after 24hours of greenish poo this weekend (a one off event so far).

However, once she wakes up for her first night feed she spends the rest of the night grunting and straining and occasionally crying in her sleep. She seems to have bad trapped wind and I'm not really sure whether she actually is asleep or not though her eyes are usually closed with arms flailing. Her nose is also stuffy at this time.

She occasionally cries whilst feeding too but not always.

I'm wondering about dairy because my brother was dairy intolerant and googling a grubby sleeping baby seems to throw up stories of others who improved by cutting out dairy. But I am puzzled that it isn't like this all the time - mainly 1:30 am - 7am.

Will repost this in the sleep section if the allergy idea is rejected by experts on this board!

Is she bf or ff? I had 3 intolerant babies. The first sounded a bit like yours but she was unsettled most of the time. We didn't realise until 11months when we upped the formula. The other two had green poo all the time were v mucousy and one of them had some blood. Fortunately having had dd1 we realised it was a possibility so I tried cutting out all dairy - this was most successful when I cut out all traces of dairy and soya in my diet, checking bread, biscuits etc. Then they were ok. All can have dairy now (youngest 4).

If you do go down the elimination route if bf you need to allow 4-7 days to see a result, but you will need medical support to make sure your diet is adequate. If ff you will need specialist formula on prescription (or v v expensive). Could just be a stomach bug which has upset her though and caused a temporary problem.

Thanks for the reply. She's bf, sorry I forgot to mention that. On another thread I started people have suggested she has a tongue tie so I wonder if I need to get some proper hands on help from an expert to help me figure out what's going on.

Either way, I'm prett sure something's not right

If she isn't like it all the time I'm not sure it's likely to be an intolerance - my son was congested after every feed (EBF), sounding like a 90 year old with a chest infection. He also had other symptoms that showed his digestive system wasn't happy - 8-10 liquid poos per day, excessive wind all the time, constant crying, screaming to be fed then screaming when being fed so feeds regularly took 2 hours, heavy cradle cap, hives on face and chest, etc, etc.

Is she BF? If she is, then it will take longer for you to see whether cutting out dairy makes any difference because you have to wait for the proteins to leave your body and then to leave hers - we didn't see any improvement for about 4 weeks and nothing really significant for another 2 after that.

I've seen other threads on here about babies being very unsettled after their night feed - it seems to be quite a common thing because of wind building up in them while they've slept, and even once my son was dairy free it was still really hard to get him to sleep after his night feed, so with luck it might just be wind!

Greta, I sort of thought that might be the case - perhaps it is only wind.

The ot good thing if it were cmpi is at least I know what action I could take, I'm not really sure what else to do for the wind... Wait for her digestive system to get bigger I suppose!

I think my son was around 12 weeks or so before he was able to sleep as well after his night feed as after the bedtime one so she should start to get better at managing the wind/digestion as she matures a bit, if that's what it is.
Maybe keep a note of any symptoms along with what you are eating (if she is BF) just to see if there is a pattern, then at least you'll know if there is likely to be an issue.