Burping baby, scoring touchdowns. Thoughts on better gas relief
Something I’ve noticed when burping baby that parents mostly do is to put their baby with the head right on their shoulder and start beating the back until a burp is finally achieved.
This generally involves a shirt with baby hork streaming down it, or at least some spot checking to see if you’ve been given a tummy gift of rich slimy goodness.
Burping baby doesn’t have to be like this
There are two methods I use to burp any baby, and I’ve generally not been horked on a lot and baby seems to appreciate getting the gas the hell out.
The method is the face down football hold (demonstrated below in both methods)
The face down football hold puts either the baby’s crotch or head in your hand. Baby will lay with almost all body pressure on the stomach. There should be no requirement to whack the baby’s back as burps seems to explode simply by putting baby in this hold.
While head-out leads to least vomit-comet potential incidents, I’ve found that head in the nook of the arm works easier for me. Your experience will of course vary.
The idea here is that when you’re holding baby up in classing position and beating the back, you’re actually just shaking the stomach and pressing it into your chest. With baby face down you’re doing constant gentle pressure and you should be rewarded with baby smells soon enough.
The downside is your arms may get tired if you’re a bit weaker, and if you’re walking around you need to give yourself quite a bit of extra room on the side.
The burping baby burlap sack slack slip and hop
An alternate to the downward football hold is what I always was familiar with, and this is to hold baby’s legs, position them higher on your shoulder than the standard burping position so that their stomach is being pressed into your shoulder naturally.
Baby’s higher up, same idea as above, natural pressure without hitting should do the trick, but you can also just walk around and let the movement of your body coax the demon gas monsters out of the evil baby.
Advantages to this are you don’t get such strange looks and baby can’t easily headbutt you in the colorbone or face. Disadvantages are it puts baby at a higher risk of throwing themselves off of you and they can now headbutt you in the cheek, eye, etc.
Other advantages are it’s a much less arm-intensive hold as you’re putting the baby’s weight on your shoulder and using your arm mostly for stabilization. Oh, and baby gets to look at the world easier.
You may have to hop a bit in order to get your ass or sassy gas gift.
The burping baby buy section
Something I’ve found that helps with gas but does not eliminate it is the Equate Infants’ Gas Relief.
A preemptive strike after a feeding seems to do the trick for staff reporter Maggie. The gripe water we used to swear by still works some, but seems more aimed at soothing an upset stomach than helping baby expel gas. So if you’ve got a farter / burping baby, go with some Equate.
You can grab some of that at Walmart if you want, it was about the same price as Amazon when we picked up some and there are other brands that probably work as well.
