‘Jenny’ described three months old ‘Thomas’ as her ‘velcro baby’ because she couldn’t put him down without him ‘crying pitifully, as if he’s been abandoned’.
Thomas spent a lot of time being carried about on her hip or upright against her in a baby sling. He did not settle well, usually having to feed to sleep. At night, he slept with his mother so that both of them got a better night’s sleep. He still woke a lot, but breastfeeding quickly soothed him back to sleep.
Thomas had small frequent vomits, a trigger-happy startle reflex, and farted a lot. Thomas’s father commented that Thomas could fart as loudly as a man! Bowel motions were a few days apart, but very runny, brownish and sometimes quite smelly and offensive – some also had strings of mucus in them.
Usually Jenny didn’t like cow milk products much, but had been surprised when pregnant that she not only enjoyed drinking milk and eating cheese, she really craved them and had a lot throughout her pregnancy. She’d had asthma and eczema as a child, then dermatitis and throat infections as an adult. These were indicators of Jenny’s own likely allergy history.
She later reported that without cow milk products and eggs in her diet, the difference in Thomas was amazing. He stopped vomiting, smiled ‘all the time’, fed less frequently but more peacefully, and stopped grunting and startling. ‘Suddenly, he’s happy just to be near me without always needing to be held!’ Thomas was also able to drop off to sleep without always relying on a breastfeed to do so.
Suddenly, he slept better and for longer than previously. She had thought it would be OK to have some processed foods and drinks in her diet, but quickly found that Thomas’s tolerance for these things was ‘almost non-existent’.
Over time, Jenny was pleasantly surprised to find that she benefitted from her dietary changes too – her dermatitis cleared up and she stopped getting throat infections altogether. She also said she felt generally healthier and more energetic than she’d ever felt before – ‘and that’s with a baby!’