Doctor
Our pediatrician is better than your pediatrician.
How do I know? Well, did your pediatrician call you from his holiday vacation just to chat and check on how your colicky baby was doing? Didn’t think so.
Filed under Parenting | Tags: colic, pediatrician | Comments (3)Two Months
It is tempting, when considering the content of a post about our second month as parents, to write “Ellie cried” and leave it at that. Because honestly, that was by far the most prominent aspect of month two.
I know that other things happened in there, though. For example, we moved the twins out of their co-sleeper in our room and into their crib in their room. This seems like a big transition to me, but for whatever reason, unlike practically every other parenting move we’ve made, we barely discussed it — we just did it. It was time, though: their combined weight was creating a depression in the co-sleeper mattress, and it didn’t take long each night for them to roll into each other and wiggle around like two little jumping beans. Which, while adorable (”They’re snuggling!” Matt says), is not conducive to long stretches of sleep. They sleep better in their cribs, and we sleep better with them there.
In fact, as difficult as the second month was (I’d venture that it was even harder than the first month), I do realize that some things have actually gotten easier. Part of it is just that we’ve figured some stuff out: bouncy seats are magical, Ellie and the pump should each have a designated boob each day so they don’t have to compete for resources, muffins and other one-handed foods make eating breakfast more likely, and a tiny bit of formula supplementation keeps Mama sane. The other part is that there are a (precious) few ways in which the babies themselves have gotten easier. Julian, for example, sleeps long stretches almost every night (anywhere from 5 to 8.5 hours). They poop less often, and usually not at all at night, so we do fewer diaper changes and none at night, which helps them go back to sleep more quickly after wakeups. And toward the end of the month, every so often, they started rewarding us with quick little (real) smiles and even the occasional big gummy grin. That makes everything feel worth it for about 30 seconds until the screaming starts back up.
Seeing their likes and dislikes emerge has also been fun. Eloise loves to have the hair dryer blown on her during diaper changes. (In fact, everything about the hair dryer makes her content. That, in combination with the fact that sticking her in a Tiffany’s box made her the happiest she’d been in days, makes me a little concerned that we have a real girly-girl on our hands.) She also loves looking at the pictures that we taped to the underside of the shelf above the changing table. She gives those things much more consistent smiles than she gives her parents. Basically if she could spend all day on the changing table, there would be no colic.
Julian likes…well, Julian seems to like just about everything just fine as long as he isn’t separated from his pacifier. Basically he’s as easygoing as Eloise is not. He particularly seems to like sleeping on our shoulders and cooing at the multi-colored giraffe on his activity mat. Oh, and eating. He doubled his birthweight in 2 months and went from less than one chin to three chins in the same amount of time.
So while there’s no question that our babies are still grubs, they are becoming grubs with more distinct personalities. Here’s hoping for tons more of that in Month Three.
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)