What Goes Down Must Come Up

This is Eli's theory on food. This kid is a MAJOR spitter-upper. Man alive. He's always been this way, but recently it's been getting worse, and just this past week he has seemed to be bothered by it. I can handle spit-up, even volumes of it, but I can't handle my sweet baby being uncomfortable because of it!

So yesterday I took him to the pediatrician to get her take on the situation. It turns out he has "acid reflux," which in layman's terms (I just typed 'turms' hehehe) is just spit-up. Duh. :) But sometimes the acid in the stomach that is being spit up again and again starts to wear on the esophagus, which makes a baby uncomfortable, especially during feedings, which is what is going on with Eli. So we started him on baby Zantac, which will minimize the amount of acid in his stomach so that when he does spit up, it won't hurt him. Unfortunately, it won't decrease the amount of spit-up. Poor mommy! :) I am considering covering our furniture (and the wood floors and all my clothing and his crib and the carpet while I'm at it) with that plastic stuff that old people have on their furniture. :)

So this morning I've already changed my clothes twice, Eli's clothes three times, and done two loads of laundry. I am trying to just be patient and go with the flow, but it's hard to do sometimes, especially on little sleep! Oh well. We're praying that this medicine helps him to feel a little better, poor thing. Thankfully, he's somehow managing to keep enough food down to gain weight- he was 7 pounds 14.5 ounces yesterday. That's 10 ounces in 10 days!

The redeeming factor in all of this is that Eli is quite possibly the sweetest baby on the planet! He smiles so much now, and he's learning new sounds to make every day. One morning at 5am I was feeding Eli, being super quiet in the dark so that he would go right back to sleep. Eric walked in to say goodbye to me before he went to work, and as soon as Eli heard Eric's voice he woke up and smiled at him. It was the sweetest thing, except that it took me forever to get him back to sleep after he got all excited to see his Daddy so early in the morning. :)

So, in spite of the gallons of spit-up that have been spilled over pretty much every surface in our house, we wouldn't trade Eli for anything in the world. We can't imagine life without him!