Babysitting for the Exclusively Breast Fed Baby!

As many of you know my daughter had a beautiful baby boy in mid June and she has been doing fantastic with breastfeeding. He has not had formula, and she is pretty adamant that he is not going to have formula. Well, he is 8 weeks old now and she wanted to go out for an hour or so without him, so of course you know she wants me to watch him.

UGH! On one hand I am so incredibly excited to spend some one on one time with my grandson, but there is another side of me that just dreads her leaving, since I know he is going to want to eat!
She had pumped 4 oz of milk, which of course is much more than he would need in an hour, but it was there if I needed it. She also informed me that he had not pooped for 5 days, I told her no worries, its normal in a EBF baby to not have a bowel movement every day. Then she was off. He was sleeping.
3 minutes after the door shut, he is crying, uh oh! Here we go. He has bad reflux, the first thing I did was put him in the sling and get him upright. OK, good, this is working, he stopped crying, we are watching his cousin play and all is going good, I relaxed a bit.

4 minutes later the baby starts screaming like he had never ever been fed!! I got the milk out, which by this time was separated and looked quite strange, it had a fat layer on it, similar to soup when you have not separated the fat yet. I take the bag of milk over to the sink, and I know I cannot shake this milk as I have heard it is bad for upset tummies and can break down the milk. Now, I want you to picture this, baby is screaming, water is running, toddler is yelling, and I am trying to gently massage this “fat” layer into the milk with one hand, oh goodness it must have been a sight to see.

Ok, milk is warm, and bottle is clean, baby is still screaming, and I am, with one hand pouring this milk from a bag into the bottle, now you all can imagine whats gonna happen right? Wrong! I did not spill a drop, I was impressed. Mind you have I have no idea how I did it, but hey it worked. 
We sit down, I held him sitting up, bottle into the mouth and he screams, and screams and screams. Toddler is now yelling to make the baby stop! Finally he takes a couple of sucks and figures out this is mom’s milk! He chokes, because of course the milk is full in the nipple and a bottle nipple just pours milk into his mouth, no matter how slow the nipple, milk is going to pour out for them, they are used to having to work for it. I move the bottle down just a bit, and he is getting all air. 
WOW! I really wanted to do this right for him, I wanted to do it right for me and my daughter as well. Understand that doing a paced feeding for a baby who is used to only eating from the breast is like a dance, very much like the dance you do with mom and baby when they are learning to breastfeed. I got it in the right position and he was getting just the right amount of milk and we were doing great, took about 30 minutes to get the first ounce in. I decide I am going to burp him, put him over my shoulder, patted twice and got a huge burp. He then did something I did not ever expect. He threw up every last drop of milk I just gave him! Sigh!

3 minutes later the boy decided that it was the day he had been waiting for and he pooped, all over him, all over me, all down his legs, up the back- you know the one everyone calls the “blowout”.

I am going to shower now.

http://kellymom.com/bf/pumpingmoms/feeding-tools/bottle-feeding/