Colic

Since the cause is not conclusively established and the amount of crying differs between babies, there is no general consensus on the definition of “colic”. Having ruled out other causes of crying, a common rule of thumb is to consider a baby “colicky” if it cries intensely more than three days a week, for more than three hours, for more than three weeks in a month. —Wikipedia [Yeah, yeah, I know.]

A simpler definition might be: colic is when your baby cries all the goddamn time for no goddamn reason.

So, Ellie’s going through a rough patch. She’s basically devolved into a finite state automaton with only three states: sleeping, eating, or screaming her head off. Since the only way to get her to stop screaming for any appreciable length of time is to transition her into another state, and since we can’t magick her to sleep, that’s meant a lot of feeding on demand and sore boobs for at least one of her parents.

The difference between the intellectual idea of “a crying baby” and your own frantically crying infant is really quite something. I know it’s a trite observation, but it’s true. Her crying somehow turns off my brain’s ability to reason and solve problems rationally, which seems like a pretty crappy evolutionary adaptation. It’s amazing we ever made it out out of the veldt.

Dr. Harvey Karp says colic is natural for a lot of babies. Developmentally, he says, it would be ideal for humans to spend a full year in the womb. Since this wouldn’t be ideal for their mothers who have to push them through the birth canal, evolution compromised at forty weeks or so. Dr. Karp refers to the first three months of life as the “fourth trimester” of pregnancy, and advises parents to treat their infants, in many respects, like fetuses. His techniques for soothing colicky babies (swaddling, sshhhing, etc.) are designed to replicate the womb environment. (Happiest Baby on the Block is one of the two books we wholeheartedly recommend for new parents.)

It makes sense, and it seems to work. Generally. Most of the time. Sometimes swaddling her and sshing her and swinging her just isn’t enough: Ellie seems to want to eat all the time, and we know she can’t be hungry all the time, so we realized she must just be comfort sucking. If she’s just sucking for comfort, rather than nutrition, then there’s really no reason she has to be attached to Rachel all day. Hence, we’re sending her to pacifier boot camp.

For a baby, Ellie is just terrible at using a pacifier (unlike her brother, who’s happy to be sucking on one every second of the day). For the first five or six weeks of her life, she would ostentatiously gag every time we put one in her mouth. We’ve been patiently and painstakingly working over the past few days on getting her to be able to take and hold on to a pacifier and it seems to be working. We’re starting to see more and more of the sweet cute little girl we remember from a few weeks ago, and we’re feeling a little less at our wits’ end.

Our yoga ball is getting a work out (she likes to be bounced on it), the swing we borrowed from Dana is on its third set of batteries (it seems to keep her calm to swing from side to side) and we’ve quadrupled our supply of “Soothies” pacifiers. We’re prepared, and we’re trying new routines and strategies and techniques, and generally trying to stay calmer than Eloise. Everyone tells us things start to calm down and ease up a bit after eight weeks. Or possibly twelve. They’d better be right.

Filed under Parenting | Tags: colic, crying, eloise, pacifier | Comments (5)