Baby squirming in pain

[shilohsmum]

Posting here for higher traffic

DS is 7 weeks old. For a while now he's struggled with squirming around with gas pains, wriggling around to get them out at night. We have tried everything: gripe water, infacol, winding after feeds, bicycle legs, tummy massage before bed, bath before bed. No tongue tie (ruled out by IBCLC) and no CMA allergy (ruled out by HV and GP).

He's breastfed mostly - sometimes has a bit of formula top up when it's DH shift and we've run out if expressed milk. We're seeing if changing the formula to anti-colic will help.

He's woken up multiple times with this gassy pain every night.

I supposed it could be something I'm eating but can't know what it is? Tired and desperate!

This is totally normal. Is he actually in pain (IE screaming) or just grunting and wiggling? If he's screaming in pain and can't be soothed by feeding then you might have an issue, but it doesn't sound like he is. Babies have very underdeveloped digestive systems and they can be very noisy sleepers. He'll grow out of it.

Apart from that, you haven't mentioned burping him at all. You need to burp properly at least after every feed, if not also half way through.

Might be an idea to also hop over to the breastfeeding board to ask for advice.

My younger dc is 14yo now but I remember in the early weeks, all brassica and v dark green veg had to go from my diet. Similarly, spicy foods so no curries or mexican type food.
You can re-introduce these things later on as the babies gut matures.

More recent bf'ers will be along soon with better advice but I hope you find a solution soon. In the meantime, stick to bland food

The squirming is pretty normal. It's just baby's digestive system getting used to working and baby learning how to poop basically! Annoying for us, but not necessarily painful for them.

I've breastfed both of mine and they've both gone through the squirmies for the first few weeks.

People will swear certain foods can do things but I've never had that with either of mine and have always eaten what I liked. They've grown out of the grunting and squirming as their digestive system matures.

We had this with our formula fed baby. Every evening from about 5pm-8pm and every morning 5am-6am. We tried everything we could think of but unfortunately the only thing that made a difference was time. Once he hit 12 weeks things just seemed to fall into place. I think their digestive systems just take that long to mature. It’s so rubbish when you’re in the midst of it and it feels like it’ll never end but it will eventually.

Thanks @MolliciousIntent - there's some conflicting info about burping after feeds for babies who are breastfed. My IBCLC says they won't need it so much anymore. I have been winding him anyway though, so don't think that's the issue x

Baby here had the squirms, grunts and general unhappiness too.
Combi fed from birth (more formula fed than breast)

I echo the above PP - only thing that worked was time. 10 weeks and he was a different baby. Hang in there. Burp a lot. It gets rid of wind which just adds to their woes.

People will tell you that breastfed babies don't need burping but it's bollocks. If you think your baby has gas, he needs to be burped more.

Thanks everyone- the reason I think he's in pain is because the wriggles will go on for 10 mins of so before he starts crying loudly during the night. Hopefully he grows out of it soon!

DS totally needed burping @shilohsmum as latch wasn't perfect due to fast flow from me. It's a myth that BF babies don't need it- it's so rare that everything is perfect.
But we also had the squirming etc- it is to some degree normal. Infacol helped about this age to get gas up when we burped him, noticed if we forgot it. But, by 3 mo ish, he was a bit bigger and stronger, my supply had settled and we didn't need it

You drinking fennel tea will help with wind. Also make sure baby is pressed right in so no danger of taking in air while feeding. Asking a breastfeeding expert to check out his position is worthwhile eg if there is a La Leche League group nearby.

I think this is just babies. I needed to hold mine upright for about 45 mins each freed to burp them or they would wake squirming and uncomfortable soon after a feed. Although it doubles the time feeding takes for me it was worth it because they then might go down for an hour or so. 7weeks is prime cluster feeding time. They do grow out of it. I think b/feeding gets so much easier about 12 weeks.

What you eat doesn’t affect breastmilk. This is a myth with really no scientific basis. B/milk is made from glands from your bloodstream, not your stomach contents.

This is nonsense. Otherwise women breastfeeding CMPA babies would not need to go dairy free.

It’s not nonsense, look at the science. There is no conclusive evidence that CMP or anything else gets through breastmilk in enough quantity to cause a reaction in the vast majority of infants. Alcohol/caffeine is obviously different because it gets directly into a mothers bloodstream however you’d still have to drink an vast quantity for it to significantly affect breastmilk. That is the most up to date research. The world has been hoodwinked (mostly by the formula industry actually).

If you do a week of just breastfeeding and no formula is he better? Id start there. Gp and he cannot rule out things like intolerance so I don't buy that nonsense.

Can I ask @shilohsmum how CMA was discounted? Going through the exact same thing at the moment, which identical symptoms and the midwife has suggested I cut out dairy. The GP doesn’t agree and says watch and wait but I’d be interested to hear why it’s been decided that your DC doesn’t have a dairy allergy. Thanks!

Not true, my son had a load of allergies and I had to eliminate them from my diet. It made a dramatic difference, before finding that out we were told it was colic and had months of terrible nights of screaming. Once I cut out his allergens, he had no problems at all.

Would they give you a referral for allergy testing? My son had other issues and had a consultant for that. He referred us and we went to the hospital for allergy testing. He was allergic to dairy, eggs, soya, nuts, celery, citrus fruit and something else I have forgotten. He has done the egg ladder and dairy ladder and outgrew the rest. Once I cut them out, he was a very happy and settled baby.

Really got to disagree with some of the advice on here. Firstly even breastfed babies have to be burped after every feed, and secondly what you eat can definitely affect your baby. Every mother and baby are different but when I breastfed I made sure to avoid any gassy foods and that included vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower broccoli etc.

You've only got half the research. You are correct that they shouldn't react but babies do react. It's a fact, they just don't entirely know why. This was from my sons allergy consultant. Massive difference after I excluded 4 allergens from my diet. He's severely allergic to 3 of these and 1 other that we hadn't identified until 12 months.

But that is purely anecdotal. A very tiny % of infants may be reactive to the absolutely minuscule amount of allergen that may get through breastmilk but that is very rare. I fed a child with anaphylactic allergy and ate her allergen regularly throughout, no notable reaction. Know lots of people the same. The most recent meta analysis of breastmilk studies say it’s highly unlikely that infants will react and certainly not in the quantities that are being diagnosed/prescribed. A lot of it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how breastmilk is actually made.

www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196813/milk-allergy-guidelines-cause-overdiagnosis-babies/

You've only got half the research. You are correct that they shouldn't react but babies do react. It's a fact, they just don't entirely know why.

The research doesn’t exist thought does it? There are very scant studies on breastmilk composition. A meta analysis of those that exist found that less than a millionth of the protein thought to cause allergy’s travel through breastmilk which wouldn’t trigger a reaction in most infants. That is what the most current research says. Yet how many b/feeding mums are instructed to cut X, Y, Z from their diets? It’s not based on science, ie. Mumbo jumbo that wouldn’t be suggested if men breastfed.

I'd be careful what you listen to. Trial and error is the only way forward for you. My personal experience was cutting out allergens from my breastmilk cleared excema that a top specialist private doctor could not. Same as the runny poos stopped when I cut out dairy. That's fact not anything else. Proteins pass through breastmilk that again is fact.

I don't think it is anecdotal if his surgeon was saying that he wanted it checking as it was probably cmpa and that we should have a full allergen workup, to see if I needed to drop anything other than dairy. There is a lot of research about cmpa and breastfeeding. I was on a host of groups about dealing with it and many babies are affected.

My DD was like this too, although she was formula fed. For us it was A LOT of burping needed after feeds. She sometimes burped 3-4 times if you sat and burped her for long enough. I always found over my shoulder a more effective technique for winding than sitting her upright on my lap. As PP said, it does get remarkably better with time, I think around the 16 week mark her struggles with wind had more or less passed.