Patti--

From personal experience I can answer that yes, some normal and healthy
breastfed infants will develop a pattern of prolonged periods between
stooling.  My eldest daughter consistently went for very long time-
periods--so long that I began to worry that I wasn't remembering what
had happened with my own child!  Therefore I began marking it on the
calendar when she had a stool.  And 12-14 days was definitely her
preferred pattern from about 3.5 months (when I started marking the
calendar;) through 8 or 9 months when she really began to eat table
foods in earnest (I didn't do the shove it in, scrap it off, shove it in
routine with any of my three--we let them decide what looked good and
how much of appropriately soft foods they partook of in a given day.)

Abdomen was never distended during the interval between stooling.
Stools were never hard, always soft, mushy, generally moderate-large
quantity with the escape artist skill of the best, or maybe it was just
that cloth diapers and plastic pants weren't as adequate at containing
the output as the more modern disposables I see today.

Come to find out that my mother reports that I too, had that sort of a
stooling pattern, which was the justification for the MD to tell her in
1950, that she had to introduce solids at 3 months.  And that's how I
got my brother who is only 15 months younger than me!

Do we have allergies, or celiac disease?  I have no food allergies,
although our Nevada rabbit brush sure does something horrible to my
sinuses every fall!  Daughter had difficulty with milk--I couldn't use
it during the 2.6 years she nursed, without her developing gas and
distress.  She was probably 5 before she would touch a glass of milk
voluntarily and still drinks very little.  She does have hyperactive
airway problems.

Curiously we both have bowel patterns that are not as regular as my
compulsive DH would like to see.  But neither of us seems to have any
pathology.

During the period when I was trying to adjust to this stooling pattern,
someone showed me an article in which a missionary's wife had stated
that they had timed their return to US from Africa for this period when
their infant was between 3 and 6 months old to take advantage of the
naturally occuring infrequent stooling of breastfeed infants.  This was
back in 1980, and I have no idea where the reference was, sorry.

Melinda Hoskins, MS, RN
Minden, Nevada 6 miles east and 2,000 feet lower than Lake Tahoe
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