Brody's first unscheduled doctor appointment

As a new mom, I've already called the pediatrician a few times in Brody's short 4 weeks of life. However, my concerns this week resulted in a trip to the doctor to get him checked out. Best part of the visit is that we learned that he's now up to 9lbs 10oz!! He's definitely gaining a good amount of weight.

(You can stop reading now if you're not interested in hearing about baby poop)

Over the weekend I noticed a couple of Brody's diapers had blood in them. Now of course this worried me a bit. But I decided to at least wait until he had another bloody diaper on Monday to call the doc. When he didn't poop all day Monday, I decided to call anyway (he normally poops 5-6 times a day). They told me that it probably wasn't anything to worry too much about and just call back if he has another one. Well when he finally pooped again, there was a tiny bit of red in it, so I decided to call back. The nurse told me to come in on Tuesday. I had done some research (courtesy of google) and found that blood in his stools can be a sign of a dairy protein allergy.

A dairy allergy has been something I've been worried about, since I was allergic to milk protein as a baby. We gave Brody formula a couple times over the weekend (a story for another day, but the formula was because I haven't been keeping up with Brody's demand with pumped breast milk). Both breastfed babies and formula fed babies can have milk protein allergies, but since non-fat milk is the first ingredient in formula, I was worried that it was causing him problems.

So today we went in to see our really great pediatrician. He looked Brody over and showed us some small tears on his butt that was probably causing the blood. He did say that another reason there could be blood is a dairy protein allergy, but it likely wasn't the cause in his case. Even though he doesn't think that Brody has an allergy, he gave us a sample of soy formula so that when we do supplement, we can use soy instead of milk based formula.

We have his one month appointment next week, so we'll check on his progress then. If the blood doesn't get worse, it's likely just the tears and not an allergy.