Cereal at 6 weeks?

Our smaller twin sometimes - not at every feeding - spits up after eating. She has reflux that she's on meds for and that is definitely helping. She has also thrown up what looks like her whole feeding on two occasions a week apart. Even with the spitting up, she is gaining weight like a champ and so is her sister. The doctor called their growth "astronomical"!!

At their 6 week weight check, we told the ped about her spitting and she suggested we add rice cereal to her bottle - 2 tsps to 4oz of her Similac Sensitive formula. We've done this for 4 feedings now and she hasn't spit up, but she is also not taking the whole 4oz anymore. It might be because it is taking a lot for her to suck it out of the nipple because it's so thick and she's falling asleep from the effort.

I just don't know how I feel about giving her cereal so early. Has anyone else done this to stop the spitting? I'm wondering if we should try switching formulas again or maybe changing bottles (we're using the Playtex Drop Ins).

 

not sure maybe get a new nipple to make the flow easier?

If pedi reccomends to do it and it is helping i say keep working with it. She is taking in more food so to speak thus the reason she can not take the entire 3 oz. Cut it down to maybe 3 oz and 1 teaspoon?

good luck!

 

We were having a similiar problem; however, the Zantac was not working. Our ped. switched us from Nutramagin to Enfamil A.R. (added rice) and it has really worked. We even went off the zantac and my daughter seems to enjoy eating again. Our Ped. thinks that the Enfamil A.R. is better than adding the rice cereal as it is a little broken down and some babies have trouble at this early age with the rice cereal.
You can also use the "faster" nipples.
Hope that helps,
Amy

 

We had to use the cereal too for projectile like spit up, but I was never able to get it to flow through the nipples right. We switched to Enfamil AR and use a hand mixer and it flows through level 1 & 2 nipples just fine. We also switched to Dr Brown's bottles, but I don't know if that helped with the spit up or not. It seems like it took 6 weeks on the AR for anything to start working for one DD, the other one had Pyloric Stenosis and nothing helped that of course, except for the operation she had.

 

I gave cereal at two weeks for my guys and their reflux. They drink less due to the cereal helping fill them up and if it is a sucking issue buy a bigger flow nipple or open up the stage one nipple a little larger.

 

All of my kids were refluxers and all were on cereal very early, from about 2 weeks on.

 

Our boys have had similar spit-up/reflux issues and our pedi recommended the same thing, which we've been doing for about a week now. We got some cheapie generic bottles from Wal-mart then cross-cut the nipple holes using a sharpened knife. we hand mix the cereal into the formula (somewhere I read that the Beechnut cereal, which is what we're using, blends better - I don't know). They have no problem sucking from those nipples and drinking about the same amount as without the cereal.

oh, fyi, we did not want to change their formula again (we already switched from similac advance to similar sensitive) b/c the babies got VERY constipated with the switch - neither we nor our pedi wanted to put them thru that again!

 

What kind of formula are you on? My guys were put on Enfamil AR because of all of the spitting up they were doing. We did the Enfamil AR AND the Zantec both for reflux.

 

Honestly, I say go for it. People are so worried about giving cereal too early these days but previous generations didn't worry much about this. Reflux is a special case and it's horrible to deal with. If cereal is helping then I'd go for it. Maybe try a variable flow nipple.

 

We were told to put cereal in the bottles at around 4-6 weeks as well for excessive spitup. It did not work for us. We switched to Enfamil AR and that really worked wonders. They were on Enfamil AR from about 8 weeks until 11 months old. It took about 7-10 days to really "kick in" and then we had a dramatic decrease in spitup.

Also one other thought for you is to increase the flow of your nipple. We found that adding cereal to the bottle or using a thick formula like Enfamil AR needed a faster nipple or the babies had a hard time getting everything out! Perhaps your babies are having to work harder to eat now and that's why they are eating less? We moved from a "slow" to a "medium" nipple and that did the trick for us.

 

We were started on cereal early on as well, for reflux and spit up issues.