We went to the doctor today because little S is having issues sleeping in a horizontal position. It seemed to us that it was reflux that was waking her up, so we wanted to get a professional opinion and maybe a prescription to help soothe her stomach so she could sleep. Because I was not getting much sleep since I'm having to hold her at an angle all night. Apparently her symptoms are not bad enough for medication. I'm not really all about medicating children, but I wanted to fix what was going on and get some sleep; whatever, I can accept that they didn't want to medicate her. The nurse practitioner (I guess doctors aren't there on the weekends) suggested that we keep her bassinet at an incline so she could sleep better...and this is where we made the mistake of telling her she was actually sleeping more in my arms than the bassinet. So we were commanded to quit co-sleeping because it kills babies. This is where I started glazing over...I have done plenty of research. Co-sleeping is not for everyone, but it works for us, and we do it as safely as possible because I was afraid of it at first.
We had mentioned that she was pretty gassy but that it had gotten some better as the sleeping horizontally had started becoming an issue. So she told me to cut dairy out of my diet for two weeks to improve the gassy-ness.
She also said we needed to make sure S burped after we told her that she often wouldn't burp after eating. How? By telling her "You better burp, or else!"?
As we were getting ready to leave, she found out that we did not use a pacifier. So she also told us that we needed to get her one. Because she needed non nutritive sucking. When my husband mentioned she had found her hand, she said, "Well, you can let her find her hand or thumb that she will still have when she's two, or you can give her a pacifier that you can throw away when she's two." But the thing is, she usually only sucks on her hand when she's hungry. So her comment did not motivate me at all. However, I had never heard of the benefits of non nutritive sucking, so when we got home I promptly did a Google search to find information on it. I found two scholarly articles on the subject, the first that studied the benefits of using pacifiers to help transition preterm babies from feeding tubes to the breast or bottle. Awesome! Pacifiers have their uses after all! The second study, however, looked at the development of the mouth and how it was affected by using pacifiers (or not) in addition to either the breast or bottle. Turns out, the mouth is least likely to develop incorrectly when breastfeeding without a pacifier and most likely to have problems when using a pacifier with bottle feeding. I felt justified. To round everything up, I also found an article that says breastfeeding babies use both nutritive and non nutritive sucking, anyway. I felt even more justified.
Oh, and we called one of our midwives to ask her opinion about what we were told. She said that the incline while sleeping was still a good idea...and that we might want to look into a chiropractic adjustment. Of course. We could have avoided this whole ordeal. Oh, well, you live and learn, right. I'll let you know how the adjustment goes. :)
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