2 months ofpoo, poo and more poo - is this normal?

[soverynewtoallthis]

DS1 (12.5 months) has gone from one poo a day (between 6 and 10.5 months) to between 5 and 8 a day/night. TMI, I know, but he never has a solid poo these days - they are like paste and are often very acidic, burning him and giving him blisters. I keep thinking, what's changed in the past 2 months... well a fair bit.

1. I stopped B-feeding at 11 months and he has formula now (and is a right guzzler - still 17oz a day) He also loves cheese/yoghurt - could it be a lactose intolerance??

1. He has been teething on and off since 10 months (very few teeth before then) Perhaps this is all teething related?

Other than the pooing, he is gaining weight and growing well so I haven't worried too much about it til now...He doesn't appear unwell in other ways. But now it is really affecting his sleep at night, as he often has a poo at night (often at 5am - dreadful to get him back to sleep.)and he wants changing, probably because he knows that it burns if he doesn't wake us up. We are knackered! 9 times out of 10 it is the poo that wakes him in the morning and long before he is due to wake.

Has anyone else got this problem? Any advice?

Thanks.

It's unlikely to be lactose intolerance - there's lactose (a sugar) in your BM.

It is likely to be an intolerance to cows milk protein - does the same thing to my DS. Soya also has a similar effect. What you can do is speak to a GP and ask for a referral to a dietician. What you'll need to do is cut out cows milk (formula, yoghurt and cheese) from his diet. You can try replacing with soya but it can cause the same thing - maybe try for a week? Given all the formula he's having, he shouldn't need so much dairy. So try not giving any except his formula just for a week. If symptoms subside, see your GP and insist on a referral as you'll need professional advice.

In our case, DS is still breastfed because we realised he couldn't have dairy or soya earlier but it's very restrictive!!

I found potato was a miracle food for stiffening up poo for one of mine.

Be very careful restricting something like dairy without medical support.

Agree earwic
With the blisters, sounds like he's having an adverse reaction to something so OP should see someone.

My DS - all 3 - used to get very acidic poo when they were teething. The rashes it caused too must have been quite painful.
Have a word with the GP/HV for suggestions. You might be told 'toddler diarrhoea' which seems to be the catch-all for - we don't really know, diagnosis is not cheap and not pleasant for small children, and they might quite easily grow out of this phase. Which could be true, but could equally not be.
If you get advice, act on it and don't see an improvement, you could ask for stool sample analysis. Plenty of easily obtained sample and it can tell you plenty about what is going on (or not) in the digestion process from what the body disgards.
It took me a long time before anyone took my DCs diarrhoea as seriously as i did. All 3 have since had different dx of intolerances. So if you feel this problem is ongoing, keep on trying to get answers.

Well,

Thanks for all of your advice and thoughts. I am on the waiting list to see the Health Visitor... until she gets in touch, though, I have bought soya yoghurt and formula. I have cut out cows milk products for the past 2 days... will give it another 5 to see if there's any difference. No sign of much changing yet but early days.

If there's no change, I might assume that he is just as sensitive to soya and go back to milk based formula, but just cut it right down (he's having too much anyway, really, I think considering I have also been giving him cheese, yoghurt etc practically everyday) and see if this reduction in dairy makes any difference.

In the meantime, I'll see what the HV says...

Fingers crossed!

Well, in case anyone is following this thread with similar issues, I thought I'd post to share the outcome of this episode... little one has a dairy intollerance - most probably the milk protein, as Iggly suggested. We have cut out all dairy and he now has Soya altenatives and is absolutely fine again. Thank goodness - no more 4 am nappy changes, no more burnt bottom, and back to a reasonable number of nappy changes again. It did, though, take 4 weeks for the effects of the dairy to work its way out of his system - I really didn't think it would work at all for the first 10 days as nothing seemed to improve. Then it got better in stages. Last weekend, he managed to sneak a handful of yoghurt covered raisins from a friend's daughter's lunchbox and his stomach was unsettled for 24 hours afterwards, so there was an almost immediate reaction to the reintroduction of dairy.

We are due to see a dietician, to check that he is getting a balanced diet more than anything else, and I have been advised that he should grow out of the intollerance in a year or so.

So, I'm just waiting for the next challenge!