Monica Beltrami, OTRL SWC CLE

Monica is a miracle worker with infants, a true «baby whisperer». Her 20+ years of pediatric experience were demonstrable in how quickly and accurately she targeted our son’s numerous feeding issues.
Our newborn son had open-​heart surgery a few days after birth — although he had a full recovery, he still had trouble feeding after he came home from the hospital. We felt for weeks that we were going around in circles trying to figure out why it was such a battle to get him onto the breast, and he still seemed to struggle on the bottle.
Once we were referred to Monica, she got back to me within 24 hours, taking a full history, truly listening and assessing our son’s condition in context of the many cardiac babies she’s seen. This in of itself was so reassuring — it’s unbelievable how many specialists we’ve seen who’ve never worked with heart babies.
She was able to schedule a home visit within a couple of days, and immediately diagnosed one of his many issues — a posterior tongue-​tie! THIS, after us seeing 2 lactation consultants prior! She was the only who figured it out! Since it would be at least a week before we could get the tongue-​tie corrected, she showed us a way to bottle-​feed our son that would reduce his choking… literally THAT day, feeds no longer became a battle and we found a calm, contented baby underneath all that discomfort.
Monica is super diligent about following-​up on our son’s progress — I’ve had many long phone conversations with her, free of charge, just updating her on how our son is doing, getting advice of things to change, etc. In subsequent visits, she showed us exercises to help our son with his newly released tongue, accurately suspected that he suffered from severe acid reflux (which ended up being another major piece of his feeding problems) and directed us to ask for a GI specialist, and showed us more bottle-​feeding positions that both helped our son’s comfort and our bonding.
She also proactively showed us exercises that has helped him improve his muscle strength and motor skills (which in turn help his feeding strength). After a visit with Monica, our son always comes away with new skills, and I discover new ways to guide him. During our last visit, Monica showed us a soothing way for us to get our hyper-​alert baby to nap — since then, instead of screaming everytime before nap time, our son actually has learned to self-​soothe to sleep!
I truly feel meeting Monica has changed our family’s life and tremendously eased this difficult time in our son’s early life. I can’t recommend her services enough!