Baking soda and water

During my first pregnancy, my mother-in-law gave me a great home remedy for heartburn/indigestion. See, I have no torso. I mean, I have one, but it's so short, it's not good for much baby carrying. I do really well during pregnancies, but my baby, pretty early on, presses my food back up into my esophagus. After three pregnancies, I've learned I can somewhat alleviate the discomfort by not eating yeasty breads and whatnots. But that doesn't necessarily do the trick. Water makes it worse (a LOT worse), and I start getting dehydrated, then cranky... ugh.

So my mother-in-law told me she had major heartburn during her pregnancies and said her main remedy was to put a teaspoon or so of baking soda into a couple ounces of water, stir, and sip. Slowly. Very slowly. If you drink it too fast, you'll drink too much, and there's really a very fine balance between enough to neutralize the burn of what comes up (we're not fixing the problem, we're definitely treating the symptom with this one, so we're not stopping stuff from coming up, we're just helping the way it feels) and burping. Big burps. Not big loud belches, but big, baking soda and meal flavored burps that feel like they come from the intestines. So the way you do it is take a sip, wait a minute or so, take another sip, wait another minute or so, until you're feeling better (this is all after you start experiencing the burn.) Then you wait and you don't drink anymore until you feel more burn, which is usually a few hours for me. This little concoction can be left by the bed to be used for the first bit after bedtime. But do let me warn you--it tastes absolutely disgusting in the morning. It's definitely best to chuck it and make it fresh if you're needing it in the morning. It will taste something like the rotting fish at a poorly-cared-for marina.

And that being said, I hope you have a wonderful day and that this can be of some help to you or someone you know. Cheers!