Newborn has cold

[viennesewhirl]

DS is 6 weeks old, started sneezing and coughing on Wednesday night, still going strong today. How long can I expect this cold to last? He's really suffering (no fever though) and it makes me nervous - he's so little!

My dd caught her first cold at 5 days old. The worst thing was the glued up nostrils which made feeding difficult.

The doctor gave me some nasal drops for her, to clear her nostrils.

The cold lasted about a week. Try not to worry too much.

Thank you! Will try to stay calm. I just want him to be better again :-)

Poor little thing. I hope he's ok. Are you BFing? If so, the best thing you can do is to expose yourself to his germs so that your body can manufacture some antibodies that will help him fight them.

DD2 was very snotty in first few weeks- saline drops from chemist were good for unblocking nose as there isnt really anything else you can use apart from having them in a steamy room.

You can get the nasal drops at the pharmacy and they are quite good - I think my DD was about 2 mths when she got her first cold. About a weeks sounds about right.

I'm sure he'll be fine, babies are pretty hardy little souls.

Thanks everyone. I am BFing and we have saline drops. I'm anxious because DH has had really bad, proper flu recently (still recovering from it actually), and so am worried that this will escalate into flu. But apparently flu begins with a high fever, which db hasn't had, so I'm crossing my fingers.

But when he's having a coughing spell, it's so awful, he looks so cross and unhappy! Sigh...

Get a nasal aspirator from the chemists, it sucks the mucus out of baby noses. I have this one here

Clears their nose really well and gives some relief cos of course they can't blow their noses.

My LO loved having it done!!

One thing that really helped DS when he was snotty as a baby was to raise the top of his moses basket so that his head was higher than his feet.

I also kept a bowl of water in his room, a wet towel on the warm radiator and put him in a steamy bathroom before bed to clear his nose.

Out of desperation one night I even tried to suck the mucus out of his little nose but I must add this was done at the height of sleep deprivation and it really didn't work....

I tried sucking the mucus out myself llareggub, apparently it is commonplace in certain parts of the world, but it wasn't effective and only succeeded in producing a look of horror from my LO!

I second raising the end of the cot/moses basket. You can do this by putting a few books under the head end but I found my baby slid down the basket. In the end I folded up a little blanket to make a "pillow" which I placed UNDER the mattress sheet, (as obviously it is very dangerous to have anything loose near a baby's face). It was perfectly safe under the sheet though.