Life's a Gas

It's early morning. I change Sadie, powder her butt with cornstarch and wrap her in a nice warm blanket. I carry my sleepy, squinty-eyed child over to the glider for a feeding. The house is quiet and peaceful; the only noises are her tiny sighs. When she finishes, twenty minutes later, she looks up into my eyes and smiles.

Then she unleashes a tremendous fart. It's immediately followed by a wetter, deeper fart, signifying that she has just crapped a giant load in her diaper.

"Good girl!" I say, thrilled, as she beams at me, and I know it's going to be a good day.

Not every day is, though. On other days, Sadie wakes up fussy and gets progressively fussier. When I try to feed her, squirms and squeals with pain. Her face screws up, turns tomato-red and she grunts and cries out and kicks. All I can do is rub her belly and bicycle her legs and wait it out. We tried Mylicon, which is a mild version of adult antacid and is supposed to break up gas bubbles in the intestinal tract. They had no effect that I could see.

We got ourselves into this child-having way with the basic knowledge that babies pass gas, and that for the first few months they often suffer indigestion. So when Sadie started having stomach pains at a few weeks old, I figured it was normal. I tried to combat them by cutting out certain foods -- sushi, chocolate -- if the day after eating them I noticed she was battling indigestion.

But this method seemed imperfect at best. Sometimes I'd eat a giant, spicy meal and the next day she'd be fine. Another day I'd eat nothing but bland food and she'd still be squealing in pain the following morning. One night I ate sushi for dinner but cut out the wasabi; the next morning she was happy as a clam. We decided that it was the wasabi that had been bothering her, but something about that didn't make sense to me. Why would wasabi upset her stomach, but a plate full of five-alarm lamb vindaloo go down just fine? How could it be that a few bites of chocolate could be enough to cause her 24 hours of pain? What was the secret to curing my daughter's discomfort?

The whole time, I was actively and purposefully ignoring one item on the list of problem foods for breastfeeding moms: dairy. There's a good reason for this: I drink a lot of milk. It does a body good, so sue me! It goes into my breakfast cereal every morning, and sometimes I enjoy a nice glass of milk with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and apple slices for lunch, and occasionally it accompanies dessert in the evening. It's a good substitute meal, too, which is what my mom used to tell me when I was snacky as a kid (sorry I didn't believe you then, mom).

The thought of cutting such an essential food item out of my diet completely was repellent enough that I just decided not to even try. Besides, Sadie's drinking milk, so why would putting milk into my body be a bad thing? I researched milk allergies, discovered that they are relatively rare, and made the decision that Sadie probably didn't have one.

But over the last couple of weeks, it became apparent that something would need to change. I could no longer chalk up Sadie's one-day-great-the-next-day-in-terrible-discomfort to everyday indigestion or fussiness. The difference was too obvious: on bad days she was irritable, scowly, prone to crying and unable to nap for very long. On good days she slept like an angel, and was nothing but smiles when awake.

So a week ago, I made a decision: I'd cut milk out of my diet for seven days. That was far long enough to see an effect or lack thereof.

The first day, she was fine.

The second day, fine again.

By the end of the week, there was no doubt about it: a milk-less milk-fed Sadie is a happy Sadie. She's been utterly great all week, with no discomfort when she feeds, no need to endlessly bicycle her legs and massage her belly and run around wringing my hands when she won't stop crying. So there you have it: no more milk, and one content baby.