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If By Yes

Tag Archives: colic

A Letter To Parents of Colicky Babies

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by IfByYes in Fritter Away, Life and Love

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

babyhood, colic, inconsolable crying, infant, newborn, normal, one month old, parenthood, second baby, second child, sleep

Dear Parent Of A Colicky Baby,

I know your pain.

I know how it feels to walk the floors for hours and hours every day, and night. I know how it feels when you read the definition of colic – crying for more than three hours a day, more than three days a week – and think, “there are babies out there who cry THAT LITTLE?”

I know how it feels to look jealously at couples in restaurants who are casually eating their dinner while their tiny baby slumbers peacefully in a car seat next to their table.

Meanwhile, YOU left your baby with a selfless friend or relative and you are trying to have a brief meal together to salvage your relationship even though you know that at this moment that your friend/relative is walking back and forth while your baby screams and screams.

Maybe you have said to each other “never again”.

Maybe you have already decided that your first born must be an only child because there is no way you can survive this a second time.

I know how that feels, too.

But.

Let me tell you about a different kind of baby.

Meet Fritter.

IMG_1937

She just turned a month old, and almost all of my photos of her feature her doing something very strange…

Continue reading →

Sleeping Baby? Does Not Compute

28 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by IfByYes in I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone..., Life and Love, Perfect Husband

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

babies, colic, crying, parenting

When your experience of parenthood was one of constant screaming and struggle, sometimes the experiences of other parents can be a little baffling.

Me: “I went to see Pug Mama last night. Her new baby was awake and not crying.”

PH: “I don’t understand. Is that possible?”

Me: “And then I held her for a while and she just fell asleep.”

PH: “That sentence doesn’t make sense.”

Me: “Wait, it gets better – then, I put her down, and she didn’t wake up.”

PH: “YOU’RE SPEAKING GIBBERISH.”

Me: “And then, and then, when she DID wake up, she just opened her eyes and started watching the boys play. She didn’t cry or anything.”

PH: “I know you think you’re speaking normally, but your words are garbled and nonsensical. Do you have aphasia?”

A Time To Fret

09 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

2 month old baby, babies, colic, GERD, growth charts, infants, percentiles, reflux, worry

Babby was two months old today.

We celebrated by going to the doctor where he screamed incessantly for an hour. Diaper change didn’t help him. Booba didn’t soothe him. The doctor and I had to talk over the crying.

“Is he often like this?” she asked (the entire clinic had heard him crying, with only occasional pauses when I put a booba-cork in his mouth, for the last half hour).

“Sorry, can you repeat the question?” I hollered.

And so on.

Last month he had been much better behaved at his appointment, and she had dismissed our complaints of “he never sleeps” and “he cries a lot” as standard parent whining. She told us she didn’t like to medicate unless absolutely necessary, and suggested we put some rice cereal in a bottle of breast milk for the colic.

But the screaming gets on your nerves fast, so this time she got serious and started writing scripts. We now have Peppermint flavoured Zantac, which I’m worried may give him a pathological loathing of candy canes in later life, as well as a (I believe) totally unnecessary prescription for thrush, because the doctor thinks we have it. I think that the “white” stuff she saw in my baby’s mouth was his tastebuds, since it doesn’t wipe away, which I tried to demonstrate. She didn’t try herself. In fact, she doesn’t touch the baby much at all, just with a stethoscope. Either she’s phobic of cuteness or just really unsure of herself. I’m pretty sure she’s younger than me.  She’s probably scared she’ll break him.

Anyway, I didn’t argue the thrush thing much because I do get occasional shooting pains in my boobas for no apparent reason, which I have become accustomed to. Maybe it’s because of thrush?

So I took the scripts she handed me and promised, loudly, that I would bring him back if these didn’t seem to work. She repeated several times that he should come in for his next well baby at 4 months, but if these prescriptions didn’t work, he should defnitely come in sooner.

Ha. I thought. Now she sees what we’ve been living with, she isn’t so quick to dismiss this. Empathy is a wonderful thing.

Since my baby was not exactly creating the nicest impression, I was feeling rather harried, but I was soothed in a burst of motherly pride when the doctor started asking about milestones.

Then I mentioned that he can roll over from stomach to back, and she looked surprised.

“That’s very advanced.”

“He’s been doing it since he was six weeks.”

“That’s VERY advanced,” she said, looking shocked.

(Of course, you and I know that the reason he is so “advanced” is because he never sleeps. That extra time thrashing around SHOULD be good for something. Besides, he was two weeks overdue, so at six weeks he was really eight weeks adjusted, right? Still, it felt good that my baby was remarkable for something other than an ear-piercing “AAH! AAH! AAAAHH!!”)

I left feeling pretty smug about my smart, if screamy, baby.  The good feeling is gone now, because I made the mistake of plotting Babby’s weight on a chart.

Now, when she plotted his weight at the clinic on the little Similac chart that she keeps in scads, she told me (over the screaming) that he was now in the 50th percentile. From where I stood, I could see that the dot fell a little below the 50th on her tiny chart, but that seemed fine. He was 50thpercentile last month, good and average, so anywhere near there is good. Then, this evening, I was thinking that since her form was a Similac brand form, it might be based on formula feeding averages and I was wondering if breast feeding averages were about the same. Out of idle curiosity, I googled breast feeding baby growth charts and found the World Health Organization’s specially-calibrated charts.

Then I doubled checked.

Then I triple checked.

…I think I might have misheard the doctor.

click to enlarge

 

She may have said “fifteenth” not “fiftieth”. I had assumed that the flurry of prescriptions was entirely due to the screaming. But now, looking at the chart, I realized that I should have asked her to repeat more sentences as she had pointed to the plots on her little graph. The graph lines were all so close together that her pen had looked close to, if not quite on, the 50th percentile mark, but I now realize that it must have been further than I thought. I had spent a lot of time nodding at her all but inaudible descriptions of what his weight gain should look like over the next few months, knowing I could look up the same information when I got home.

I hadn’t realized that she might have been trying to tell me, gently, that he wasn’t gaining what he should.

Or maybe she’s incompetent and didn’t notice this drop. Or maybe (my favourite option) I’m missing something obvious and everything is totally normal.

I know he spits up a lot, but I never dreamed that he wasn’t gaining weight properly. I mean, I thought he was plumping out.

Should I be worried?

"...But I'm so BIG!!"

 

 

 

What No One Told Me About Parenthood

05 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, Life and Love, Me vs The Sad, Perfect Husband

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

babies, colic, crying, love, motherhood, parenthood

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading Mommy Blogs, it’s that love for one’s child is totally independent of actually enjoying the day-to-day life of being a parent.

Parents are human.

Parents get tired.

Parents get stressed.

Parents sometimes need TWO FREAKING MINUTES without another human being clinging to them.

Yet many women tend to romanticize parenthood, and then the overwhelming reality of baby care tends to gobsmack us.  Women everywhere are struggling with accepting this, and it’s a feminist act, a step towards sanity and freedom, to say “it’s okay to find this really damn stressful, and you can hate the individual moments while still loving your baby.”

So people have been telling me from the moment they found out I was pregnant that this was going to be awful. They tried their best to prepare me for the fact that no matter how ready you think you are for that baby, the screaming and the sleep deprivation and changing the diaper that you JUST CHANGED TEN MINUTES AGO will get to you, eventually.

“Sleep while you can!” they would tell me, as if I could store the sleep in the jar for when I would really need it.

“Want mine?” they would leer threateningly, looking vaguely hopeful that I would say “yes” and take their devil child off of their hands forever.

“Babies are false advertising, you know,” I was reminded.

“You won’t be getting sex again for at least six weeks after the baby is born,” the OB warned PH with a cruel laugh.

People have been telling and telling us how insanely difficult we would find parenthood. The love I would have for my baby was touted as a consolation prize that would help make up for all of the inherent awfulness.

I believed them. I had learned from the Puppy Incident that life just doesn’t go by the book, and that reality really likes to smack you in the face with a metaphorical dead trout.  So I tried to prepare myself. I didn’t want to be all “I’m so disillusioned” while the Mommy Blogging community laughed and said “told you so!” I also knew that I was at a high risk of Post Partum Depression, since I was already on antidepressants and still struggling with blues through my pregnancy.

In order to properly slaughter any romantic notions that might have been frolicking innocently in my brain, I subjected myself to every horror story I could find. I read It Sucked, And Then I Cried, and Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, and prepared myself for similar crazy.  I expected PPD and an increase of my antidepressants. I hoped I wouldn’t have to contend with colic, sure that a screamer would push me round the bend.

Rage Babby is Rageful

I did get a screamer.

Some days, like yesterday, he nurses almost constantly for the whole day, and wakes up and cries if I put him down. The house is a mess. My Perfect Husband is overworked and sleep deprived and constantly berating himself for not being able to do everything, including lactation.

So when I went to see the shrink on Wednesday, and she asked me how I was doing, we were both surprised by my answer.

I’m doing awesome.

I love motherhood.

Even when Babby won’t sleep all day and insists on spending the entire day hanging off of my nipple like a lamprey, until I feel literally drained… I’m still pretty happy. The PPD hasn’t arrived. Between the two of us, I think that poor Perfect Husband, what with having to get up early in the morning after the late nights of Babby-wrangling, is closer to the edge than I am.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have my moments. Caring for the baby is very time consuming, so the dishes go unwashed and the floor goes unswept, especially on days when he just doesn’t want to be put down. PH has to pick up the slack. Sometimes I sit there, being sucked on for hours on end, and glare at poor PH, who has the unimaginable freedom to move around the house unencumbered almost all the time. As much as he tries to help with diaper changes and baby snuggling, the incessant demands for booba mean that I am still the one with the baby 90% of the time, even on weekends. It isn’t PH’s fault. It isn’t even his preference. He wants to care for his baby. If he could lactate, I’m sure he would. But he can’t, and I can. And sometimes, that sucks.

But I wouldn’t switch places with him in a million years. Because honestly? I like having something to take care of. I loved taking care of my crazy, always-awake, totally-active, needs-constant-supervision puppy. I even loved Tamagotchis when they were all the rage, and all they would do in return for my constant care was beep at me demandingly. So I like caring for someone who depends on me, love being so important to another living thing. I love thinking of ways to make their life better. I love cuddling something that is MINE.

That part… that’s everything I fantasized. BETTER, because I believed the horror stories over my own fantasies, so I didn’t think it would actually be this awesome. But it is. I love snuggling my baby, and even when he is screaming and looking at me with the most rageful expressions, I just keep thinking “Aw. You’re so cute when you pout like that” and then I kiss his cheek while he goes “Aaa! Aaah! Aaaaah!” in my ear.

When he sleeps for more than an hour or two at a time, I am deeply grateful. But when he wakes up, I’m grateful too, because when he’s sleeping I really miss the little bastard. I’m delighted to be able to pick him up and hug him again; reunited after a long separation.

I like smiling into his eyes, the eyes that look at me so seriously and then stare off in the distance while his brow furrows. Those eyes are so human, so thoughtful, and I know he’s wondering what it’s all about. I want him to know that it’s all about how loved he is. I want those eyes to grow up to see the world with confidence, and joy. And I want his life to start with a smiling mother who always answers his cries with unconditional love. So even when I’m feeling stressed and drained, I make a point of smiling at him anyway, and we both feel happier because of it.

Besides, the screaming is getting less and less. There’s a lot more smiling and a lot less screaming than there was three weeks ago, and his smiles are so joyful that he made a whole crowd of female employees at PH’s work go “awwww!” in unison when he graced them with one.

Parenthood comes with all the strains and difficulties that I was warned about.  What no one told me is that I could have them all and still think it was pretty fun.

No one told me that I might actually like this job.

I kiss you, little rage babby

What a Cluster-Fuss

07 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone...

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

babies, cluster feeding, colic, crying, fussing, infant sleep, sleep

So, on Wednesdays I have to strap the baby into the car and drive an hour to the Women’s hospital for a post-partum group. On the plus-side, it’s in the mornings, so he usually sleeps in the car on the way there and only fusses moderately between eating and sleeping during the actual session. On the down side, morning is when I usually get the majority of my sleep so I am running off of three hours sleep and it finishes around noon, so he screams part of the way home.

Anyway, the group focuses a lot on how to not go insane, and emphasizes self-care with chipper little acronyms like N.E.S.T.S., S.M.A.R.T.S., and so on.

So they were working on goal-setting, and they give you things to aim for, like three square meals a day or four hours of uninterrupted sleep. They asked me what I thought I needed to work on and I said I wasn’t getting three meals a day, more like 1-2 plus snacks. So the group starts problem solving for me, trying to set a Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Reachable, Time-Sensitive, Supported goal.

It went like this:

Group Leader: “So, sometimes you get lunch, and you always get dinner?”

Me: “Yes, my husband cooks dinner and feeds me when he gets home. We take turns holding the baby while the other eats.”

Group Leader: “What about breakfast?”

Me: “That’s my sleep-when-he-sleeps time. I keep napping whenever he sleeps until I feel rested and get up, and that’s often not til late morning, so lunch is also kind of breakfast.”

Group Leader: “So let’s set a goal of regular lunches! What would you say are the main obstacles to your eating lunch?”

Me: “It depends on the day. If he is still sleeping when I get up, I can sometimes grab a shower and shove some food into my mouth before he wakes up for the day. If he wakes me up, then I probably won’t have a chance to eat lunch. I’ll eat crackers or something while I breastfeed, but not a real lunch.”

Fellow Mother(s): “I know, there’s so much you want to get done when they fall asleep that it’s easy to forget to eat. I have this problem too!”

Me: “I would eat if he slept. He doesn’t sleep.”

Group Leader: “It feels that way, sometimes, I know, but you know, it’s normal for breastfeeding babies to wake and eat frequently.”

Me: “No, I mean, he’s often up for five, six, seven hours in a row. He eats, and he cries, and he eats, and he cries, but he doesn’t sleep.”

Fellow Mother(s): *sympathetic murmurings and tales about their own babies’ colic, and suggestions about gripe water etc.*

GL: “He’s up for six hours? How old is he again?”

Me: “Four weeks, and yes, regularly. On good days, he doesn’t get really cranky until late afternoon, and the day goes mostly ok: I can often get him to sleep if I put him in this Sleepy Wrap, like he is now, and he screams for a bit then sometimes falls asleep.”

GL: “Okay, so when he’s asleep in his carrier, then you can eat, right?”

Me: “Right, although stuff falls on his head. But yesterday, for example, he was up at 10:30 in the morning and crying and eating, crying and eating all day and until nearly 11 pm that night. In that time he only had half an hour of sleep at from 12:30-1 pm and two hours from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. ”

GL: “You say he fell asleep at 11 pm last night. Does he sleep overnight, then?”

Me: “Yes. I mean, he wakes to be breastfed every hour and a half to two hours, but in between feedings he sleeps. Then from late morning/early afternoon until late at night that he’s awake. So I get most of my sleep late at night and in the morning.”

GL: “I feel bad for you having to come here in the mornings, now!”

Me: “Well, in a way it sucks because I get no sleep, but on the other hand, it means he’s actually relatively quiet during these group sessions.”

*Babby has fussed and cried in a manner disruptive to the group at least three times by this point: Before being breast fed, a bit between breasts, and after breastfeeding when placed back in his Sleepy Wrap. He has been the ONLY baby to fuss and cry during this session at all. The seven week old has been sleeping peacefully, and the older babies have been babbling happily or nursing quietly*

GL: “…Is he asleep now?”

Me: *checking him in his carrier* “Ye… no, wait, nope.”

FM(s): “No, his eyes are wide open.”

GL: “…Okay, so can you eat while he is awake like this?”

Me: “If he’s quietly awake, like he is now, then I can eat while he’s awake. But in the afternoon he’s not usually quietly awake, he’s crying. I can’t just put him in his basket and let him scream. I physically can’t do it. I can put him in this wrap, and let him cry himself to sleep sometimes, because then I feel like I’m attending him if I’m carrying him. But I can’t let him cry in his basket.”

GL: “So if you had him on you in his carrier, but crying, then could you eat?”

Me: “Well, see, he claws at my face and neck while he cries, so I can’t get food past him into my mouth. It’d be like trying to get past the arms of an attacking squid.”

*A moment of stunned and sympathetic silence from the group leaders and my fellow mothers.*

GL: “…I feel like we should be feeding you RIGHT NOW!”

So, basically, the tl;dr of it all is that my baby cries so much that it astounded all of the other mothers with colicky babies, and confounded the poor Group Leader. In the end, the general consensus was that my goal for this week should be to eat lunch every day, even if the baby is screaming, and that to facilitate this I should make sure PH leaves me some dinner leftovers in the fridge every evening, so the next day I just need to pop it in the microwave and gobble it.

The thing that astounds me is that emotionally I’m actually doing okay, despite a baby that only sleeps two and a half hours in a 12 hour period some days. I feel way better than when I was pregnant – much more balanced – and I never feel angry or upset with Babby, even after hours of crying. But the crying thing is definitely exhausting on both me and PH. I went to the library and checked out more books on baby sleep. The Baby Sleep Guide says

“Some babies will stay up for hours, nursing and fussing, nursing and fussing, sometimes for hours on end…. The cluster-fuss has a way of striking just as parents are getting ready to sit down and relax together after a long day. The chaos and crying can feel like complete insanity….And it’s rough on the parent when nothing seems to help the baby.”

They’re telling us.

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