Tricks for Getting Baby to Feed.

Both my boys were Reflux babies that refused to feed due to associating the breast/milk with pain.  So most of my day was spent trying to get a tired, hungry and confused baby to feed despite the pain.  Luckily we did come up with a few solutions.  I have no idea what other mummys in the same situation do, but here are a few of our ideas.

Something I was told by the Reflux guru from Plunket about feeding a Reflux baby, that I discovered was very true, is that it must be all about you and the baby without any other noise or disruptions around.  It must be a very calm and peaceful time.

Karl and I like to call our first solution "Dummy to Mummy".  Get baby to suck on the dummy and put them to sleep.... almost.  Not so much that they stop sucking the dummy though.  When they are in that early sleep stage line yourself up and quickly swap the dummy for yourself.  You will find they then breastfeed.  You have to keep rubbing their cheek or foot etc gently to keep them not totally asleep and to keep them sucking.  This is a sleepy feed and therefore quite an inefficient feed – but a feed nonetheless.  If I could get five minutes out of Flynn I was happy.

My husband used to literally run around the house with Flynn in his arms to put him to sleep before a feed.  I did a lot of rocking and singing and so forth.  All of this as you can imagine makes sleep training harder later on after the reflux has gone, as they are used to being assisted to sleep. This became quite hard for us as he got older and didn’t need as many sleeps.  And that is where the next trick was discovered – distraction.

"Distraction".  Flynnie always liked to fiddle with jewellery and my cell phone (still does actually).  So I would let him play with my watch, or phone or some buttons on my top.  That would be enough for him to be willing to have a quick feed from when he was about six months old.

-          

-       "Persistence".  As I have mentioned earlier, Master Chase would do none of the above.  He wouldn't take a dummy full stop.  He wasn't easily distracted and quite often he would wake up as soon as I had put the breast in his mouth.  All I could do with Chase is keep putting him to sleep until he would finally take the breast and have a sleepy feed.  Chase had visible Reflux so he was bringing up a bit of the small amount of milk he was getting so Plunket, the Paediatrician and I all had to watch that he never got to the 'failure to thrive' stage.  This made it all the more important to keep persisting until he would take even just a little bit.  

      

     If I think of any other things we did I will add to the above list.