I've convinced her to exclusively BF this (her 4th) child and now the baby is not gaining weight and in fact lost weight in the past month. She is 5 mos old and the ped just told her to add 1 bottle of formula/day.

The baby has to be woken up to eat (never had THAT problem with my kids) and has recently been spitting up a lot. how the hell is formula going to help that?

Is there something else she can do? the ped also wants her to start cereal to help her gain weight. red flags are going off inside my head, but i dont' want to give mom bad advice, and it's been awhile since I bf a baby

so, what should I tell her?

Tell her to stick with it, and if the baby needs another feeding, try to fit one in. Burp, burp, and burp some more. Oh and feed before weigh in.

I told her the burp trick after the last appointment.

I know you said she has to wake up the baby, but is it possible baby is more interested in things going on around her than eating? I have noticed the last couple days or so that Daniel is much more interactive and will go much longer times between feedings (of course then when he realizes he is hungry he screams like I am starving him to death until he latches on!) I have just had to offer to him a few times because he seems to "forget" to eat. He is 4 months old ftr. But he will be enjoying looking around, babbling, etc, and then basically wear himself out enough to fall asleep, then wake up starving again lol.

He still eats quite often, so I almost wonder if he is going further stretches because of me being back at work, but then when I had a few days off he was right back on track of eating every 2 hours or so.

If the baby is teething, that could throw everything off. I'm surprised the ped didn't consider that. Has she tried gripe water? That might help the spit-up issue.

My dds had check-ups where they hadn't gained anything, and the ped wasn't concerned at all. She could tell they were healthy and happy. The next time they always went right back on their growth curve.