How many ounces are you feeding him? How old is he? How much does he weigh? Breast or bottle? Formula or mommy milk?.
Our baby is technically almost 3 months old, but he was born 10 weeks premature, so developmentally if he were born on time, he'd only be about 2 weeks old right now, he's been home from the hospital for about 4 weeks now. His last weigh-in with a home health nurse was 6lbs 6oz, but that was 2 weeks ago, they don't come anymore and we haven't had a Dr. visit since, so if I had to guess, probably a pound more than that, somewhere around 7.5 lbs.
We've been feeding him 50ml(little under 2 oz) when we bottle feed him, which is only twice a day, just so we can give him his liquid vitamin and he gets a human milk fortifier that adds 4 calories per 25ml of fluid, to help with weight gain since he's so small. He eats every 3 hours, we still have him on his hospital schedule, so that makes 6 breast feedings per day, and 2 bottle feedings with pumped breast milk.
If mommy milk what is her diet, any spicy or greasy food?
We've tried all sorts of stuff there. We have 2 months worth of colostrum & milk stored in our freezer from when mom was pumping and the child wasn't eating anywhere near the amount she pumped while he was in the hospital, and obviously now he gets fresh milk at least 6 times a day, but we've run the gamut of eating normally(we do eat a lot of spicy food), to eating on a strict, bland, high-protein diet(lot of grilled chicken breasts), and none of it seemed to matter much.
Many parents over feed their kids. Their stomachs are tiny. If he is only on the boob then you might have no clue how much they eat but contrary to lactation people humans do like to over eat. Hell plenty of kids will even under eat especially if they are sleepers so no nature doesn't just take care of itself perfectly without intervention.
As of right now, I think we are going to try forsaking the Dr. orders to wake him every 3 hours to eat, even if he's sleeping(they're concerned with weight gain, he's so small for his age he isn't even in a percentile on their charts(so I guess, <1%). He was born at 2.5lbs. What happens now is that he generally sleeps pretty well at either his 7PM feeding, or his 10PM feeding, but then once we wake him up for the 1am feeding, he never sleeps another full hour for the rest of the night, even after the 4am and 7am feedings. He just stays up and cries all night if he's laying in his crib. I think if he's sleeping soundly after the 7/10 feeding, we're just going to let him go to see how long he sleeps. Age-wise, since he's almost 3 months he *could* start sleeping a lot longer at night, but developmentally he's still a newborn if you go by his gestation age, so it's hard to tell where he's at exactly.
We generally feed him, then hold him upright for 30-45 minutes before we put him down, but it often doesn't help with his reflux. Generally when he starts screaming, we come in and the whole side of his head is covered in milk and his sheet is soaked, he's spit up a TON. He's actually almost choked a few times, but luckily we've caught it. About 4 or 5 times now he's spit up so bad that the milk even comes out his nose and he chokes/can't breathe. We have to rush in, pick him up, flip him over, and pat him on the back while he's held face-down until air starts to flow again. This REALLY pisses him off/scares him, and he generally won't sleep again for hours, he's wide awake at that point.
My wife goes back to work in 3 weeks. Right now she's up with him all night from about 2am onward, but that won't be doable here shortly, we need to figure something out or we're both looking at being constantly exhausted.
