Monday, December 10, 2007

Day 81 - Spit Stop

In my life I have always had two fears: heights and insects (don't even talk about tall insects with me). Today I proudly add a third: baby spit up.

Do you know how some people have a fear of balloons? How they fear that any second that balloon will burst into bits? That's what I feel like about baby spit up. After you feed that baby you don't know when or where, but eventually that kid is going to open up and spew out mommy's boob juice.

And that's another thing. Your kid is spitting up your wife's tit pee. I know it's natural and healthy and totally normal...BUT STILL...I can't get out of my mind when I'm scrubbing that sofa with sudsy water and a sponge that I'm cleaning up tit pee. Come on now. That's a little gross.

I don't think Emma and Andrew spit up too regularly which makes it all the worse for me. Their unpredictable spit schedule drives me crazy. Are they going to spit up on my shoulder? Where's a burp cloth? Is it a good idea to hold Emma's head over this laptop after a feeding? But like a good bulimic, after our kids purge they don't complain or cry. If anything they tend to be happy and sometimes even smile.

About forty percent of young babies spit up regularly and the peak age for this is around four months. Our kids aren't even three months yet so they haven't even hit their prime. The cause of spit up can be any number of things. Maybe the baby is taking in too much air when they're feeding. Overeating can also do it especially since their digestive system isn't totally developed yet. Another known cause is sticking your finger at the back of your baby's tongue.

So what do you do to keep the food down? Burping, keeping your baby in an upright position after feeding, and trying to calm your kid can all help. We're pretty good about making sure our babies burp, and we just started to keep Emma upright after feedings. We had her stop doing sit-ups cause we think that might've been problematic.

No more sit-ups for you, Missy!

1 comment:

Capitol Herbs said...

As far as I know, there's nothing that would work for Zane's spitting up. My friend told me the other day that Zane spit up more than any other kid she knows. I tried holding him at an angle, burping him, using a different bottle (Dr. Brown's) on the rare occasions I used a bottle, not throwing him in the air after feeding, and nothing worked. My lame advice is to just keep a burp cloth handy until the babies grow out of it. It may not come until they're 8 months old, but it'll come.