Dirty Nappy every 3-4 days

[skippy84]

Hi there, just looking for some advise, my baby is four weeks old and seems to be falling into a pattern of only having a (very full) dirty nappy every 3/4 days. The poo is soft and mustard coloured when it comes out and she is gaining weight well (is over 11lbs was 9 7 at birth) and is breastfeeding well. She has plenty of wet nappies but I have read to expect 4-5 dirty nappies a day. Does anyone have any experience of this/ideas on what might be causing it?

Sounds normal to me. my DD only pooed once or twice a week when she was tiny. Breast milk is very easily digested so there's not much waste. If the poo is soft and your DD doesn't have any trouble passing it then I wouldn't worry too much. You sound like you are both doing well!

I think the 4-5 dirty nappies a day must refer to wet nappies rather than poo, I've never heard of a baby pooing that much!

This is perfectly normal. I've bf 2. DC1 pooed with every feed until weaned. DC2's record is 12 days. Anything between every feed and every 2 weeks is normal for a bf baby.

Sounds like your LO is thriving to me [hsmile]

Yup, normal. They go from weeing/pooing constantly to hardly pooing at all. Mine was a bit older, I think; 7 weeks or so? But certainly, for exclusively BF babies, this is standard behaviour.

Once you relax about it, it's rather lovely. Speaking as the mother of a toddler who produces at least two copious odourific poos a day, treasure this time!

Perfectly normal. Both my DDs were like this - only pooped every 4 days. And when they did finally go, it was always an absolutely enormous explosion, generally when we were out and about, and mostly when I'd run out of clean nappies . They were both very talented that way!!

The 4-5 a day means wet nappies, not soiled.

Really normal :) It is because they are able to use almost every gram of breastmilk, so there is hardly anything left to be poo.

I used to dread taking DS out on day 4 because there would invariably be an explosion!
I can recommend cloth nappies as being MUCH better at containing BF poo than disposables!

During growth spurts, the lack of pooing can go on for longer. I think 9 days was our record, I was getting very nervous!! :)

I would definitely agree with Ali on cloth nappies.... they contain almost all poo explosions, whereas you may well need to bin an entire outfit after explosions in a disposable.

Annie - we had to throw stuff when DS was tiny before we moved to cloth. Once by accident because I had bagged up a whole outfit in a nappy sack which was the only plastic bag I had, and DH flung it out with the dirty nappies when he emptied the car boot when we got home. I was gutted!
Actually found that we did less laundry once we were on cloth, because we weren't having to change outfit every time DS did a poo.