Winnie was less than thrilled with his matching lamb headgear and only cooperated for a few photos. But it was still cute.
However it was pretty warm when it was time for trick-or-treating so I decided the lamb costume might be too hot. We had to go with a backup costume...ballerina! Still cute!
We went trick or treating with Bill's friend/coworker and his kids in our neighborhood. It was a great night for strolling and collecting candy! Somehow the candy just magically fell into her stroller as we went past each house. I wasn't complaining or objecting. Bill harassed me for collecting candy for a baby, but hey, she was cute. I couldn't help it if people wanted to throw candy at her.
She was cooperative for about an hour and then it was getting to be bedtime so we headed home. Pretty good for her first Halloween.
And now, for the tricks of Halloween. She is still having eating and sleeping issues and I'm racking my brain and harassing doctors until we get this figured out. Per the GI's advice, we tried increasing her acid reflux meds but that did not produce any improvements at all. After extensive googling I decided there must be some issue with the solid foods, so I took her completely off solids for 2 weeks. She seemed to do much better...went back to sleeping through the night, eating her bottles without objecting.
I then contacted a nutritionist because I figured she must have some kind of food intolerance. We made an appointment on Halloween, but in the meantime the nutritionist recommended giving her just one serving a day of bananas, b/c that's a pretty safe food. So we started with bananas last Tuesday. For the first 4 days there didn't seem to be any problems, but by Saturday there was a return of the symptoms. Fussing and refusing bottles, not pooping, not eating. She only took 13 ounces of formula!! So I thought, aha! Bananas are the culprit. And promptly stopped giving them to her.
But when we met with the dietician yesterday, she was puzzled by Caroline's behavior. She reviewed the list of solid foods Caroline had been eating and said that they were all pretty 'safe' foods that don't usually cause problems. I mentioned that the bananas seemed to cause problems...even with only one small 3 ounce serving per day of bananas for a few days, she became extremely constipated and didn't poop for 4 days afterwards! I told her I'd even given Caroline 2 doses per day on Sunday and Monday of Lactalose to help her poop, and she still didn't poop until Tuesday! Bad bananas! But the dietician said bananas don't cause constipation like that, and that it was concerning that 4 doses of Lactalose still didn't produce a good bowel movement. Most people will have loose stools/diarrhea when given Lactalose.
She said Caroline should be eating 32 ounces per day of formula, IN ADDITION to the solid foods. I scoffed and said on a good day we're lucky if she'll take 24 ounces. Sometimes, like Saturday, she'll only take 13 or 15. Clearly this is not acceptable...she should be eating more, and we need answers as to why she's not eating. She advised me to keep pressing our GI to get to the bottom of this issue and told me to keep trusting my mommy instincts. I'm losing faith in our GI...I feel like he's never really paid attention to Caroline's milk allergy and is always quick to focus on the reflux. His methodology is incredibly slow and frustrating...it's always 'try this and and I'll see you in 4 weeks.' We went through this slow process for 2 months last spring before I finally got aggravated and tired of waiting and took matters into my own hands and put her on Elecare, at which point she got better. So I'm not willing to wait for another painstakingly slow process of trial-and-error while this drags on for several more months. It's already been almost 3 months of this now.
So we're still muddling through, and if I don't get answers soon I will consider switching GI's. The dietician went through a very similar situation with her own son who was not eating, and the doctors just wanted to put him on tube feeding...totally treating the symptom, not the cause. She had to keep yelling and screaming until they found a doctor who got to the root of the problem and helped her son. I took her GI's name and will contact him soon if this isn't resolved quickly!
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