Hard Night

On the eve of her one month birthday, Kira is giving her mommy a run for her money.

She has been crying pretty hard for a while now. Mike has her. She is just really not happy about life.

Here's what's been going on... she had started screaming really hard a couple of weeks ago at certain points during the day. Then she started having fizzy poop. Zach had what I called "coke fizz" poop. This wasn't quite that bad, but it was just full of bubbles. I started researching and most things said it was probably a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance. Meaning that she's getting a lot of watery breast milk and not enough high fat breast milk. Usually caused when the mom has too much milk. So I started working to make sure that she was getting the fattier hindmilk. Well, things were going alright. The number of poops seemed to decrease, the general fizziness also decreased, and she even seemed to scream less. Seemed pretty good, right?

Not so fast... her fizzy poop turned to a very watery poop and then a little thicker, but with lots of mucus in it. And finally today, she had a small streak of blood in her poop. And tonight she has been pretty much inconsolable.

So. There are basically two things that could be going on (according to what I've read, anyway). 1) This could all be from getting too much foremilk. Basically, the watery milk is very high in lactose and can overload baby's system and cause them to have digestive problems... thus the mucus and eventually blood. 2) This could be symptoms of a milk protein allergy. If she's sensitive to milk proteins that I'm ingesting, her body reacts with the mucus and blood in the poo. So I would need to cut out all dairy products.

Cutting out dairy can take 2 to 3 weeks to see positive results in the baby. And the foremilk problem can also take 2 to 3 weeks to resolve. So how will I know what's working? I suppose after 3 weeks, if she's doing better, I can have a glass of milk and sit back and see what happens.

But for tonight, and I suppose the next many nights, we'll just have to try to calm a crying baby. Hopefully it will all be a blur in a couple of months much like labor already is.

Oh, and she's still really cute. :)