Ellie's New Diet

So, Ellie is a spitter-upper. No big deal right? Every kid spits up a lot and acts like they have a bad taste in their mouth because... um, have you smelled spit-up? Or so I thought.
About the time of the baby blessing we noticed that every once in a while Ellie REALLY spat-up. Like, not a drop left of food in her stomach and she's hungry afterward. I know, so awesome to get covered in vomit and then have a screaming baby because now that her stomach is empty, she's HUNGRY! And when Ellie is hungry, it's a big. deal. She may be a little food-centric...

Well, we thought she was draining from being sick and that was causing the big spit ups. Then when she obviously wasn't sick, we thought it was from allergies. And then the last couple of weeks the big spit-ups became more and more frequent till we knew one would come every 2 or 3 days. So we called the doctor to see if we could reduce the drainage and help her not to get such an upset tummy.

Well, turns out that not every baby spits up all the time and acts like they're chewing their cud, or coughs with a bad taste in their mouth. Those are all signs of reflux. Silly first-time parents.... The doctor asked us a bunch of questions, realized what it was, and then as she was explaining what to do kept saying "See, she's refluxing right now." That only happened like 3 times in about 5 or 10 minutes. Crap! I didn't realize it was such a problem or that she was dealing with it that often.

Luckily, Ellie has the reflux but not the heartburn that sometimes comes with it. How do we know? Because the baby the doctor saw earlier that day with it was a GRUMP - all the time - because the heartburn hurt. Where as Ellie is only really a grump when she is tired, or mostly hungry.

So, Ellie is on a new diet - to eh, keep her girlish figure. (So funny that the doctor looked at Ellie and told us that "She may be throwing up, but she's obviously keeping something down..." Not like she was 14 LBS 10 OZ when they weighed her in!)

So now Ellie gets to have oatmeal cereal in her bottles whenever she is going to stay awake to give her stomach something more solid to work on. It basically looks like sludge.

See what I mean? Before and after adding oatmeal:
And then we have the pleasure of sitting with her for half an hour afterward while we try to keep her mostly still so her stomach can settle some. In more severe cases we'd have to elevate her mattress to a 45 degree angle and/or put her on the equivalent of baby zantac.

Lucky for us, Ellie is so into her food. As a result, she doesn't care what it is. Milk, different formulas, oatmeal milk, just give her food! And... so far so good! She's hardly spit up and seems to be her happy self. We even heard her give a real, actual, undeniable laugh Thursday! Nothing since, just her little chuckles that sound a little bit like yelling or winding up to cry...
So, our little monkey - or cow? - is doing well and now she has something more solid to eat most of the time. You know, so she can start putting weight on....
PS, the pictures are from this past Thursday and Friday. Ellie in some of the outfits Julie sent her from Japan - with added layers for warmth. Thanks Aunt Julie!