Last weekend we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel in regards to Lior’s wind/colic problems. As you may already know, Lior’s first few months of life have not been easy. He has had the most awful gas problems you ever did see. The first four weeks of my baby’s life were filled with pain. We would spend hours and hours every night dealing with a little boy obviously hurting so damn much, and feeling totally helpless. I can’t recollect seeing him happy very often. When he was about 7 weeks old and I was watching a video on how newborns share visual cues and signs with their parents, and they showed little babies, only a week or two old, just looking around with their eyes open, not crying. I was really taken aback. Lior cried ALL the time. And so did I. His gas was the worse, and the “He’s fine”, “All babies get wind” comments from nurses and doctors were not helpful. At that point I felt relief, because I kinda knew for sure in my heart then that I wasn’t just making it up- Lior’s wind was really bad.

The comments like “The first six weeks are hard, it’ll get better after that” gave me hope, until he was past that milestone, and still suffering major bouts of pain (though at this point not as bad as we’d started the infacol). Then people told me that he would grow out his wind by 3 months. I was a bit more sceptical about this, and a few weeks after his 3 month birthday we’re still dealing with wind, but as the title suggests- we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!

We’ve had Lior on infacol from 4 weeks old, and it’s helped a lot. In fact, we’ve tried HEAPS of things, and I think each has helped. I can see the difference in him when we stop doing one of them.

Despite how adament the nurses and doctors I spoke to were that I didn’t have to change what I was eating (they would say “We don’t tell mothers that they can’t eat certain things while breastfeeding anymore. He’ll grow out of it…”), I followed my gut, and searched the internet for a list of foods that, when consumed through a mother’s breast millk, would give a baby gas. I found a list on a forum given to someone from their naturopath, and started following that- modifying it depending on what I could see set Lior off, and what he was okay with. Oh, and a bit of research into my favourite question- WHY.

I’m still researching the whole “WHY” of breastfeeding and gas, but sometimes I find you need to do things without knowing the exactly WHY, and find out later. For our sanity’s sake!

At the recommendation of our own nautropath, who I talk with via email, we started Lior on some Inner Health Plus for kids. I also started on Inner Health Plus, so that Lior could get some it through my milk as well. Along with this we also started taking Lior to the chiropractor, which helped with lots of things, including his back alignment to reduce wind. One of the advantages of the chiropractor was Lior sleeping much better, which enabled me to experiment with the food I was eating a bit more, because if he had a bad night of wind, I was well-slept enough to deal with it.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been slowly adding foods back into my diet, which has been reasonably positive. I’ve started with some of the more common fruits and vegies that were on the list, as well as herbs. He hasn’t reacted, thank goodness, so once he’s sitting up, and getting closer to crawling, we’ll bring the full range of foods back on the menu.

A few weeks ago, on Lior’s 3 month birthday (people repeatedly tell me that they grow out of the wind by three months- as if this somehow makes life easier to bare while we’re WAITING for three months…?!), I gave him a feed without the infacol. It did NOT go well, so we were back on to it for the rest of the day, and for the rest of the week after that.

Just a week and a half ago though, we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I misplaced the infacol bottle, so gave him his first feed of the day without it. He was fine, so I gave him his second feed without it, and continued without it for the day. I was sure we’d pay for it that night, but he was fine! Three whole days he was off the infacol, and by the night of the third day things were getting a bit rough again. I was out of the habit by this stage though, and probably left it a bit late to give it to him again, so we’ve had a few rough days with the wind again. BUT it I’m still clinging to that hope! He’s really only having the infacol for his feeds after noon now, which is such a huge step forward!

A day of sleeping on mummy last week when the wind was really bad.