I'm babysitting- How do I help this baby not spit up so much?

Here is a sort of everything you wanted to know about frequent spitting up from kids growth. It does discuss position and how to feed.

Sort of scary, isn’t it?

Good luck.

Take away it’s Skoal.

First of all, stop sitting on him.

It happens , he has ate / drank too much for his little tum .
I always found it amazing and shocking just how much babies throw up .

My kid spit up all the time, even after a good burp. Nothing would surprise me, and I would not be worried at all if I was you, especially if the mom said it was normal. My advise is to relax, and use thin new born blankets, or a rain poncho as a ‘burp cloth’ to save your clothes. @eponymoushipster took my other answer.

My son was spitter upper. It sucked. He had minor reflux, not enough to warrant medication.
We would keep him upright for quite a while after eating, and since we coslept, he would rest his head on my arm so he was elevated (probably easier with one child, I can’t imagine doing that with a toddler)
Some babies are just like that. We were formula feeding at that point, and used Enfamil A.R. which is thickened formula, which helped us a lot. Is he drinking expressed breastmilk?

Don’t feed him!! Let him barf on his parents

Some babies just spit up a lot, no matter what you do/don’t do. (Sometimes it would seem like they were spitting up more than they ate, lol)

Next time you feed him, try keeping him upright for as long as possible. Have him sit in a swing or even a high chair (or on your lap) while you read to him, sing to him, etc. Besides not overfeeding and burping really well, keeping him upright lets gravity help keep the formula down.

I’m trying to remember the optimal time to be sitting up, and I think it’s half an hour to 45 minutes.

Thanks all! He’s home and probably puking on mommy. I ended up keeping him very still after he finished eating. I even held off burping him for a long, long time. He still spit up, but only twice and it was little amounts.

I appreciate all your advice.

My daughter did the same thing. The cause of her spitting up was her formula was too thin. The doctor recommended I put single grain oatmeal for babies in her bottle. Spitting up stopped right away. But have the babies mother check with the doc… Worked for me

@ubersiren whew!

For future readers with this same question, keeping the child upright is the easiest plan. We used a “boppy” pillow, with is a horseshoe shaped pillow you sit the baby inside of.

Isn’t spitting normal? Babies do it all the time. Don’t let it worry you.

@bea2345 It’s not necessarily normal, it can indicate a serious issue…it’s always best to get it checked out, as I’m sure @ubersiren‘s friend did, since she warned her about it.

@bea2345 : It is normal in small episodes, but this child was doing it excessively. My living room was drenched in baby barf.

@ubersiren Both of my girls hurled what looked like loads more than they drank , enough to fill a sink it looked . Freaking hated it when they did it , not cause they were barfin everywhere but cause it made us a wee bitty scared . Oh the joys will arrive again soon tho
* Goes and waterproofs the house *

@sandystrachan : Haha…. good luck with that, and congrats! Maybe this time will be better.

A nurse told me once, if there is anything that makes you uneasy, bring the baby in and ask questions. If the child is gaining and is otherwise healthy, then spitting is not a problem (only messy).

A lot of babies have reflux. There isn’t really a way to stop the spitting-up completely, but making sure the baby burps during & after the feeding, then keeping him/her as upright as possible for atleast two hours will help tremendously. I prop my 2 month old up either in her boppy pillow (actually it’s a cuddle-u, which is the same thing as a boppy except it has a little strap for the legs so that the baby can’t wriggle down and suffocate) or in her car seat, and it really has helped a lot.

Unless the baby is vomiting (different from spitting up in the sense that it’s A LOT of milk he/she is losing, and is forceful/projectile), it’s nothing to worry about and normal.

He may be overfed. Some babies swallow more than they can actually handle. Feed him in smaller amounts only you’ll have to feed him more frequently. Especially as @stemnyjones suggested he has reflux. In which case he will still spit up. But a less full belly will help prevent the reflux a bit and give them time to digest the milk. When you lay him down he should be in a donut kind of sitting up. Its what we did for reflux babies. They sleep a lot better because the milk isn’t coming up. Its a lot easier for that to happen when they are laying down.
In our day care it always seemed to take twice as long to burp them as well. So he may need more burping. Only be sure he is kind of sitting up so the formula doesn’t come up while he’s trying to burp.
As an adult with acid reflux, I can tell you the worst thing to do is lay down on a full belly. If the baby tends to cry a lot when being laid down its probably reflux. The acid will come up and burn the esophagus.

Read @YARNLADY I was about to say the same thing but it has been said.