What to do when our 2-week-old baby sleeps little and cries a lot?
Two weeks ago, my wife gave birth to our 3.7 kg, 55 cm son. His weight dropped to 3.4 kg after the first day, because we did not feed him enough from breastfeeding. Fortunately, he gained back his birth weight on the 5th day with formula and we kept feeding him with the formula. We stopped breastfeeding on the 10th day. Around the 10th day, he weighed about 3.9 kg, and his weight steadily increased to 4.1 kg yesterday, the 14th day.
Things have gone well until yesterday. Our son has been crying way too frequently and sometimes the crying lasts 2-3 hours. In the end, we had to settle him by feeding him, and we are scared that we fed him too much. We usually feed him about 600-700 ml a day. But since he was crying so much and was short on sleep (10-12 hours), we have fed him about 750 ml of formula in the last 24 hours. After the exhausting night with little sleep (I believe the formula we gave was enough), his weight had dropped from 4.1 kg to 3.8 this morning, just slightly above his birth weight.
So now I am really worried about him. Any suggestion to my concern is greatly appreciated!
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If newborn child is crying, he/she is:
pissed in trousers (use diapers!!!)
or want to eat
or feeling hot
or feeling cold
Bet a 100 dollars that you wear him too much (overcare), and not feeding him when he wants.
And try to change formula.
PS. It may be such thing as abdominal pain. In Russia we call this "??????" (koliki), don't know how to translate this correctly. No one knows reason for this. It has a rule of three threes: starts on third week from birth, may continue up to age of three months, and may continue for three hours per day.
Using formula (instead of breastfeeding) worsens it.
If you know Russian (or can translate using Google Translate) check this site - www.komarovskiy.net/navigator/koliki.html - of the best child doctor in the world (he's from Ukraine).
Breastfeeding is always way better for the baby, health wise, so if possible I would start by switching back to breastfeeding, but of course there are sometimes reasons why this is not doable. The other thing to try is switching to a lactose free formula. Lots of babies are lactose intolerant. They grow out of this quickly as their bodies start producing lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose - lactose is the sugar found in cow's milk). A soy based formula works well. One of our children was lactose intolerant (and still is at 17), and would throw up at every feeding, although we were only giving him one bottle a day and the other feedings were breastfeeding. The thing was that his digestive system had become so messed up by the lactose, that he could no longer hold anything down. When we switched him to lactose free, within two days, the problems cleared up. Also, we always fed our children as much as they would take, and none of them have had any problems from that, that we can tell. But also be ready to take him to a doctor. It is entirely possible that the problem is unrelated to his eating, and the eating is just a pacifier that is helping him calm down.
A bit late, but I thought I could add a few points.
The weight drop is completely normal, and has nothing to do with how much you feed. Generally speaking, all newborns lose weight after birth. After about 2 weeks, they gain the weight back. See this article for more details.
As for formula, try to get samples of various formulas. While I never had an issue, my mom said she tried nearly all the formulas until she found one that made me not upset (I refused the boob and preferred formula when I was an infant).
Also, I recently had an extremely colicky son. Sometimes there is nothing you can do to "fix" the crying, but simply hold and rock them (exercise ball is a must, infants love the bouncing). Imagine your digestive system is really starting to work for the first time, it must feel very strange!
Sadly, some babies just cry (a lot in my case). It will not last forever, and soon the 20+ hours of nearly constant daily crying will be a memory that you will cherish.
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