Weaning baby rice?10/12 weeks old

[loubuch09]

Advice wanted....my 10 week old baby girl is taking in excess of 35 oz of milk per day. feeding on demand every 1-2 hours day and night i am exhausted and i am sure she is too. She is a very unsettled/unhappy colicky baby. She was 9.11 lb at birth (2 weeks overdue) and now weighs 13.5 lb do i try a bit of baby rice made up with her milk. My mums thinks its def worth a try as when i was a baby (25yr ago) i was month prem and she was adviced to give me rice at 12 weeks old? its so conflicting. so what do you guys think?

No don't do it. If it is colic then it will ease very soon, we had a colicky baby and it just sorted itself out at about 11 weeks. I wouldn't be giving "rice water" with sweeteners in either. It does sound like it might be slient reflux (so called because it's not accompanied by vomiting). I'd talk to your health visitor and maybe look at changing formula.

After 3 months of constant crying, that's when I did this and never looked back

Yes, three months is almost always when 'colic' goes away.

www.kellymom.com/nutrition/solids/delay-solids.html

I actually gave my son( also a big, hungry baby) baby rice from a spoon at 5 weeks!! I also carried on breastfeeding, but he just needed more! He is now a very healthy 14year old! I also tried formula for hungrier babies eventually, which helped. Infant gaviscon helped my cousin enormously.

My DS weighs 16lb and is 9 weeks.

Wouldn't dream of weaning him early, his breastfeeding will just increase if he needs more. Actually though I find that he feeds very efficiently, and last night slept through from 10pm till 6am.

Its a real difficult one You ahve all convinced me not to try baby rice despite close friend and families advice, i will wait until at least 17 weeks after discussing with HV. What you have convinced me of though is that i do have some more avenues to explore.
There are a few probs that i know for my daughter, she rarely get enough sleep (perhaps 11/12 hours in 24) so the moby wrap sling i have kinda helps her to feel comforted in the day.
The cranial osteopath-I cannot fin one locally (Kent) and on looking at sites does seem to make sense I had a very long labour...56 hours altold as was induced eventually ended with ventouse delivery of my 9 pound 11 ounce girl! I never considered that this could have consequences for my babies well being?!will try and ring around today and see if i get any joy.
Also the silent reflux does make sense from those of you that have shared snippets-Thank you. Particularly Scruffyhound my daughter doesnt obviously have reflux as not overly sicky maybe she'll have one day out of 7 where she projectiles on average but her feed are very irregular 2 oz, 6oz, 7oz 1 oz allsorts and i can never gauge what she will take and she does arch her back which is now makin me think?!
I am losing faith in dr as they have said 'shell grow out of it' its colic' nothing wrong with her, but i KNOW there is. She is not a happy little lady but feel she wants to be.I will now call DR (for prob the 10th time) but be armed with more info and ask for infant gaviscon-can i buy it do you know?
Thanks to all x

A five week old baby doesn't need more than milk, what a ridiculous thing to do.

I agree Rita - why do people always think that hungry babies will do better with solids?? It can't be ignorance because there's SO much information out there all saying There Are More Calories In Milk but you hear over and over again - "oh, give him a bit of baby rice if he's hungry". You might just as well feed them wallpaper paste.

No, not ignorant, very well educated and informed, even though we had no Internet in those days!! You guys are very lucky if you never felt that desperate! In those days, the advice was to wait until 3-4 months, my baby was the size and weight of one that age. You know your own baby, they're all different, and you trust your instinct.

Obviously trusting your instincts doesn't work if your instinct is to feed a 5 week old rice.

I wonder if she is crying from tiredness rather than for milk. With my DS, I kept thinking he was hungry as he cried so often but I later realised that he was crying because he was tired, not hungry (as he didn't sleep much either). Because sucking on breast/bottle comforts a baby the tendency is to think "oh he must've been hungry as the milk has stopped him crying" but they could be being overfed and that could make them uncomfortable too. Though it was a long time since mine were a baby and I have no idea how much milk they should be having now so you'd need to check with your HV about that.

As for your mum's advice - I think it's natural for our parents to advise us to do what they did but it's ridiculous to go by advice that is 30 years old or more. They didn't even know that smoking or drinking during pregnancy was bad then!

Confusing age with weight seems a bit mad too.

OP if your baby's on Nutramigen then it sounds like someone somewhere thinks she has a milk protein allergy (not lactose intolerance, this is different and incredibly rare in small babies).

I would suggest going back to whoever prescribed the Nutramigen and asking to try Neocate or Nutramigen AA. All the symptoms you describe can be caused by milk allergy and it could be that she is one of the babies for whom Nutramigen is not broken down enough. Neocate has no cow's milk in it whatsoever and is suitable for babies with severe cow's milk allergy/ intolerance.

I really don't think it's hunger - she doesn't need rice, which as others have pointed out is not very calorific anyway and won't give her the energy she needs to grow.

well, Ritamorgan, my instinct can't have been that bad, because, as mentioned earlier, he is a very healthy, very bright, lovely 14 year old boy! Just to shock you all a bit more, my mum, a MW and HV at the time, fed my brother from a spoon at 11DAYS!!! He is a very healthy, successful 45year old! Have any of you thought to ask your mothers about when you were weaned? I'm not arguing with current advice, just giving the info that theOP asked for. One size really doesn't fit all.

Well my mil - a nurse - was advised to wean dh at 8 weeks because he was 'hungry'. Of course he has asthma now and his digestive system is not in great nick - so mindgone you'll understand why I didn't follow that example.

Yeah, there's statistically a correlation between the 16-week weaning they were advised to do in the 60s and 70s and the huge increase in asthma, eczema and hay fever in the last 40 years.

Oh, and the massive prevalence of gastric ulcers in the current crop of 30-40 year olds.

I was weaned at 16 weeks, as was the advice in the 1980s.

By the way, my MIL smoked all through her pregnancy and around DP when he was a child. He didn't die of cot death and he doesn't have asthma. In fact, he is healthy and successful! There you go, one size doesn't fit all.

It's so hard with small babies, particularly when they're so unsettled. Definitely take her to the docs but I too am a fan of cranial osteopathy. I was cynical at first but DS was such an unsettled baby and had been through a tough birth that after the fourth person suggested it to me I gave it a go.
After his last session he was honestly a completely different baby, I would never have believed it if it hadn't happened to my child! I would suggest docs first though if it is reflux and can be sorted easily with no cost then great. Good luck, I remember those days, so hard but it does get easier. X

You have one of the best regarded cranial osteopaths for babies in the country in Kent, Stuart Korth in tunbridge Wells. I'd also really recommend trying it. I used to work with someone who trained with him, and the difference in little babies even after one session could be amazing.

There are always people saying things like 'oh my child was wean at two days old, never did him any harm'. It doesn't make it right or mean that all babies can be weaned extremely early. It's certainly not right to go round encouraging others to wean stupidly early because your own child was fine. In desperate times, parents will try anything and for people to tell them that its ok to wean at just over a month old (WTF?) is terrible advice, and could lead to an extremely ill baby!

OP, I had a baby who fed very regularly in the day. Turns out she had reflux. See your GP to check for this. Once DD was on meds, she fed much less often because originally she was feeding lots to numb to pain of the acid reflux. I weaned early, 17/18 weeks on the advice of a Dr, and to be honest, she became worse for sleeping once weaned. She went from waking once a night just before she was weaned, to every 90 minutes. What I'm trying to say is that weaning isn't always the answer. Small babies need milk, veg and fruit purees have few calories so don't fill them up.