My baby only wants milk, HELP!

My baby only wants milk! Help!

My oldest daughter, now 3, was on solid foods and loving it by the time she was 6 1/2 months old. And she’s a good eater. She doesn’t demand sugar too much, she eats veggies and she loves steak as much as or more than her daddy (that’s me). So I really didn’t get what the big deal was about parents who had a problem getting their kids to eat but I was happy that she was fine.

Then our second daughter arrived and by the end of 6 months she refused to put anything in her mouth other than milk. The real big downsides of this are:

1. The baby wakes up more often during the night for feeding (3-5 times is not unusual).

2. You constantly worry about proper development, are they getting enough nutrition?

3. Washing bottles and preparing baby formula constantly isn’t really what I’d call a hobby I enjoy.

But by the time our daughter was 11 months old, a pediatrician we consulted with said that she was out the bottom on the baby development chart (below the 5th percentile in height and weight) and at this point I really started worrying. As an aside, my wife is petite, so I always knew there was the possibility of our daughters being petite as well, but that didn’t stop me from worrying. Anyways, the pediatrician gave us various techniques to essentially force our daughter to eat. None of them worked and all of them made me feel a little guilty because she was obviously beyond miserable.

We then left Mexico to visit some family in LA and I went and saw the doctor who had taken care of me when I was a kid. She told me all about her youngest son who had been a “milk baby” and the great frustration she had to go through as well as the worries on development because just milk isn’t enough by itself. So she started researching and testing various concoctions until she found one that worked great for her kid and after several months he went up to the 100th percentile on his growth chart and has stayed there for the last 3 years. Her theory was that it wasn’t really the taste as much as the texture of the food that the kids had a problem with.

Now as a note, we already complemented the breastfeeding with barley formula (http://youtu.be/feQ6FcZRgFg) because we don’t like using the powdered baby formula products. So now we were looking adding another supplemental/complementary milk formula to this. I rounded up the products and started making this every morning right when she wanted her “wake-up” bottle and at first she started drinking it and then spit it out. I kept trying until I finally found that with the banana out of the mix, she drank it no problem.

I’ve been giving this to her now for almost 5 months and she has now gone up to the 68th percentile on the height chart so I am relieved and happy. The nightly awakenings are still exhausting but my wife and I deal with it as a team so it’s bearable.

The formula she gave us was: (NOTE: CHECK WITH YOUR OWN DOCTOR FOR THE EXACT QUANTITIES AND INGREDIENTS FOR YOUR KID!!!)

12 ounces of organic vitamin d milk, or whatever milk your baby uses.

1 1/2 Tablespoons of vanilla flavored egg protein powder (I use 1/3 scoop of the protein powder I bought which means basically 8 grams of protein. You have to figure out the proportion based off the protein powder you use and how much your baby should be getting. I know there are dozens of others out there such as whey proteins, but I haven’t checked into any of those yet)

1 tablespoon of Kidsafe Supreme Superfood. This is basically powderized vegetables, fruits and other good stuff with all the amino acids, vitamins, iron, etc… intact. Pretty expensive but worth it.

1 teaspoon of organic flax seed oil

1/2 teaspoon blackstrap molasses for all the B-complex vitamins. This is a strong flavored ingredient, the doctor recommended a full teaspoon but until I brought it down to a 1/2 teaspoon or about 14 drops, my daughter wouldn’t drink it.

Fill up a 9 ounce bottle. If your baby won’t drink the milk because it is slightly chilly, then warm the milk before you blend it. But I found my daughter preferred it slightly cool. I then usually have about 3-4 ounces leftover and I drink that and then head out with them for daycare.

Hope that helps.

Best,

T.C.F.

 

 

 

Putting your baby on a schedule

Now from your experience does putting your baby to a schedule help in the future?

If it does what kind of schedules worked for u and does it stay the same as she grows up? I have only a bedtime schedule where she sleeps around 9:30 to 10. Do u think that’s a good time

I do it on her demands so I think am doing the best I can just wanna do a much better job.

 

I’m sure you are an amazing mother doing the best you can and always trying to do better. No child could ask for better than that!

BABY SCHEDULES…

Schedules are a must with children. Otherwise your life will be in continuous chaos. It also gives your child the beginning principles of discipline and order which is important in development.

As a note on this, I believe in feeding your child when they are hungry and letting them sleep when they are tired although if I daughter was getting ready to fall asleep around 7 pm we would usually play with her to keep her up until about 9 so that she then had a nice long sleep instead of waking up at midnight.

A general schedule that worked for us at the start up until she was 4 months old was:

9am feed the baby.

10-12pm go out with baby in the stroller so they get out of the house at least once a day

12pm feed the baby

1pm – 3pm baby nap if she could. Household chores during this time.

3pm feed the baby.

4pm – 7pm dad plays with the baby including helping the baby take steps, crawl, etc… to start getting the baby tired and hungry and give mom a much needed break.

7pm – 730pm wash the baby and get her ready for bed.

730 pm – 830pm feed the baby.

8:30 – 9:00 lullabyes

9:00 baby to sleep.

9:00 pm – 6am feed the baby and put them back to sleep until they won’t sleep anymore which usually is between 6 and 7am.

Once our daughter hit 6 months the feeding got easier because solids came into the equation and less milk/formula was needed and also she was starting to crawl and amuse herself which freed up more of our time.

6:30 am wake up and formula

7am – 9am play time.

930 – 12 stroll and outside time (includes coffee shop and mall time for mom)

12:30 solid food feeding.

1230 – 3pm nap time if they will (otherwise just let them fall asleep whenever they do)

3pm formula and/or solid food feeding.

4pm – 7pm dad play time.

7pm good solid food dinner

7:30 bath time and ready for bed.

8:30 final bottle of formula for the day

9:00 lullabyes

9:30 bedtime.

Hope that helps!

best,

Dare

www.cluelessfather.com

dsw@cluelessfather.com

Mosquito Repellant Device

Bloodsucker prevention device. (Note to all teenage girls, don’t worry it won’t repel vampires). Ensure to use it far enough from children so they don’t get intoxicated.

The Sleep Sleuth Case 1- Bloodsuckers vs Ninjas

After a long period of 8-9 hours sleep every night, on Friday night our daughter began waking up crying every two hours or so. This happened again on Saturday night leaving mom and I totally exhausted again.

I am clueless so I didn’t know that this was natural and babies just get moody sometimes and decide not to sleep.

Instead I decided that enough was enough, something had to be wrong. We checked our daughters crib in painful detail. No apparent problem. We checked the room. Nothing. We then stripped her back to her birthday suit and looked over every inch of her skin… Aha!!!! Bite marks…not from Lestat or Edward but from a damn mosquito.

I hate bloodsuckers. So with ninja like skills I spent two hours killing four of them in various parts of the apartment in near darkness at around 1 am.

Then I heard my wife yelling and slapping glass shower doors in the bathroom and thinking Alfred Hitchcock was doing a reshoot I sprinted to the bathroom in a quasi-panic only to discover that it was just my wife trying to swat a fifth.

We put anti-itch cream on the mosquito bites and bought an anti-mosquito thing from the local super-market. We plugged it in far enough away from the baby’s room so that she wouldn’t get intoxicated but close enough to kill any flying bloodsuckers.

We fed her and then…peace for 8 hours of sleep. During the day our daughter cried much less. Although still a bit moody. Night came again. Peace for 9 hours and baby was her normal happy self once again the next day and the same again last night and this morning.

Case closed.

Darius Aka The Clueless Father