Grandma's Advice

ellebelle1990

My son, James Archer was born 2 months ago. He's wonderful, exclusively breastfeeding and almost sleeping through the night!
The problem is grandma... who tries to be helpful but since week 5 has been aggressively campaigning to add rice cereal to his bottle at night to get him to sleep longer. Both myself and my boyfriend have told her no politely, but it just pushed her to now make comments anytime he cries after 7:30pm that if he would already be asleep if we'd do it... and then there's the comments about him being too skinny despite his healthy weight gain.
It's not that I think it'll hurt my son. I just don't see the point in doing it if he's almost already sleeping through the night, doesn't have acid reflux and is gaining weight at a healthy pace.... Especially given that he already struggles to poo and sometimes it constipates little ones.
How do I get it across to grandma that we have decided as parents after extensive research that adding rice cereal to his bottle is not something we feel is necessary without offending her?

meggyme

Let the doctor be the bad guy. Say that your pediatrician is happy with LO's weight gain and has said that the rice cereal thing is unneccesary and possibly dangerous (it's now recommended that you wait until 4-6 months for solids of any kind). If she still pushes, tell her that when she gets a doctorate in pediatrics you'll happily consider her input.

nackie

I agree with pp. 2 months is really, really early to be starting on any kinds of solids and I’m sure the doctor will be happy to tell you so. Also, if he’s almost sleeping through the night at 2 months, he’s sleeping amazingly well and I wouldn’t want to do anything to mess that up. 
There’s also no real research that adding solids helps with sleeping. BM has way more calories than rice cereal, so it doesn’t seem like it would help him gain weight at all.