I am so glad to have found this rice cereal for baby.

My first two children didn’t have any gas or digestion problems, but Llany did.  He started with really bad gas at about 2 months.  I tried changing my diet several times to see if it was something coming through into my milk that was affecting him, but I never had any success pinpointing what it was.  When I looked online to see what foods might be upsetting his stomach, it seemed like the possibilities were ridiculously endless – could be: meat products, milk products, wheat products, tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, beans… and on and on the list went.

Even when I cut my diet way back and stuck to the simplest foods I could, he still had the gas and from cutting back calories and nutrients in my own diet, I started to lose my milk supply.  I ditched changing my eating and started giving Llany Mylicon drops after feedings to help with the gas and help him sleep.

There are a lot of moms who swear by Gripe Water which seems better for baby because it is all natural.  Llany hated Gripe Water.  I think perhaps because of the taste, but also because it was so cold since it has to be kept refrigerated.  It was impossible to get him to consume two dropper fulls of Gripe Water every time he had gas.  He would just dribble it out of his mouth, all over himself, and cry.  Whenever he saw the Mylicon drops coming his way he responded anciously and seemed to really enjoy the taste of it.  So that’s what I stuck with.

Around 4 months, because Llany still was not sleeping through the night… EVER… the doctor suggested that I start introducing rice cereal into his diet.  I started giving him basic organic rice cereal made by Earth’s Best.  Adding the rice didn’t help or worsen his gas, nor did it help him sleep through the night.

At 6 months I added apples, bananas, and sweet potatoes to Llany’s diet.  I added them one at a time, one per week, and at first he seemed fine with all of them.  However by 7 months Llany’s gas had worsened and it seemed he was needing Mylicon drops after every meal, all day long, otherwise he was in pain. It got so bad that at times, even the drops wouldn’t work.  Not knowing what else to do I took him completely off of all solids and went back to breast feeding alone.  This caused the gas problems to go back to their normal state and he only needed drops after nursing before bedtime to help him sleep comfortably.

So now, at eight months of age I knew I needed to get solids back into Llany’s diet and progress with adding a variety of foods, but I didn’t know how to do it without upsetting his stomach.  I was afraid that my son might have food allergies or digestive problems which were causing his system to react both to my breast milk, as well as the solid foods I was trying to give to him.

Then… finally… while expressing my frustrations over this dilema with a dear friend, she told me about Happy Bellies Cereals with pro-biotics.  She told me that the pro-biotics assist with digestion.  So I headed out and bought a can and found this written excerpt on the back.

Happy Bellies cereals are organic and include DHA for brain and eye development and Iron.  They also include pro-biotics which are the live micro-organisms that aid in digestion which you may have seen advertised in yogurts like Activia and Dan-active.

At eight months I started slowly adding Happy Bellies cereal into Llany’s strict diet of breast milk only.  After a week of no gas problems at all, I started to add in apples, sweet potatoes, and bananas mixed with the pro-biotic enriched cereal, and still there were no gas problems.

I am happy to say that ever since I started using the Happy Bellies cereals with Llany at the age of eight months, I have never again had to give him Mylicon drops or any thing else to help with gas.  His digestive problems seemed to disappear overnight once he was eating the cereal and now he eats anything and everything with no problems.

I can’t say that the cereal caused him to start sleeping through the night.  The solution to that issue came after he turned one and I stopped nursing him.  Since he couldn’t have milk in the middle of the night anymore I guess he decided there was no more reason to wake up.  Each of my three kids have started sleeping through the night at entirely different stages with different solutions (that is a whole new post in itself… maybe I’ll work on that one for another time.)

What I can say is that I really believe Happy Bellies helped improve my son’s digestion and may have eliminated some intolerances he was developing towards foods.  With the huge increase in food allergies amongst children these days such as reactions to peanuts, lactose, and gluten, I highly encourage parents to try starting their children on pro-biotics in their infancy to help strengthen their digestive and immune systems.

Check out the array of Happy Bellies cereals and products…

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