Sleep, sleep tonight...

You know how things come back and bite you on the arse? Well, a little while ago, we were luxuriating in the fact that our little baba sleeps from eight in the evening until six the next morning? Yeah...

Hopefully it's just because madam is still a little put out by her adventures with tummy bugs, but the last few nights, she's been getting us up in the middle of the night for a feed. Last night, I was still up doing a bit of computing. Occasionally I could hear a burst of noise from the baby monitor, but generally it had been quiet. About midnight, Olivia started making noises which built up until we had crying. Then I heard a plaintive voice from K___, "Can you come and get her?"

I grabbed the baby and took her into the kitchen with me and sorted her a bottle. She guzzled the first three ounces, but after that it was a bit of a struggle. On the one hand, she seemed too dozy to eat, but when I put her back in her cot, I had to rescue her again a couple of minutes later. Fortunately, K___ didn't wake. In the end it was half one before I she was tired enough to go back down.

Then she woke us at ten to six. Grrrr. Hopefully this won't last. K___ tells me that Olivia's reaching the point where baby's start to want things NOW, GODDAMN IT! and knows the buttons to push to make it happen (she didn't know this already?). With that in mind, we really don't want her to make the connection that results in her wailing in the middle of the night and us picking her up and feeding her etc.

Might have to break out the SuperNanny book...

Pain and Anger in the Howling Dark

When I got in last night, K___ revealed that Olivia had declined to sleep all day and was in a crotchety mood. She had been a bit of a rat bag the night before too. Cue five hours of hell with very little time off. That’s for me. K___ had had it for muuuuuuuuch longer.

Those of you without much experience of this - either because you're child-free or you're one of those lucky bastards with nicely behaved babies - will probably find it hard to understand how mentally and physically debilitating it is to have a deeply distressed child in your arms for any length of time. Welcome then, to the delights of a child with colic.

What is colic? Well, no one really knows, which is obviously brilliant news. Some definitions I’ve seen say simply that it’s ‘more than three hours of continuous crying’, in which case she’s got it. Others say it’s a pain in the gut – the word is etymologically related to ‘colon’ - perhaps related to trapped wind. One source I found on the Interwebulator simply suggested it was a word used by paediatricians when they just don’t know what in the name of buggery is wrong.

But what causes it, I hear you say? Well, they don’t really know that either. It may be a response to an over-stimulating world, it may be trapped wind. Apparently it might even be an attempt to communicate that ‘something is wrong’, although that seems like specious and circular reasoning to me.

What symptoms are there then? Mainly, it’s the screaming. Screaming that goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on pretty much without change for hours, unless it is to find some even more distressing sound to tear holes in Mummy and Daddy’s hearts. Sometimes changing the position of the baby will stop her for a moment or two, just long enough for you to dare to hope she might settle, before starting again, as though this is some sort of Sysiphean torture.

The fact is that ‘torture’ is an extremely appropriate word. It’s torture for Olivia and it’s torture for us. K___ and I have both been brought to tears by it. When you know that your baby is warm and fed and in a clean nappy and doesn’t want to suck on a soother or a finger and turns purple every time you put her down, when you have tried all of these things and she is still in acute distress, the sense of helplessness and the feelings of frustration and failure are overwhelming.

It can also make you irritable. In fact, not just irritable. On a couple of occasions, the despair has got far closer to anger than either of us would have liked. You hear of people who get to the end of their tethers and hurt their babies. Whilst I obviously don't condone it at all, I can understand where that anger comes from and it might only take a lack of maturity and self-awareness that splits those people from the majority of us who control themselves.

We’re lucky. We both recognise when we’ve reached breaking point, and we know to give the baby to the other, or put her down and go into the other room or put her in the buggy and go for a walk.

Sometimes, worn down by the grind of sensory overload and sleep deprivation, we have both briefly wondered whether we have made a mistake in having a baby and yearned for life b.c. (before crying). We've sat and talked about it and we've both admitted having felt these negative emotions. We both feel like we’re bad parents and bad people for feeling like this.

It turns out, from talking to colleagues and friends, and reading up on it, that the sort of people who think these awful things are called ‘parents’ and it’s far more common than you - or at least ‘we’ – had imagined. It is a big relief to know that other people understand and that you come out of the other side of it.

However, none of this guilt and angsting helps the tiny girl with the purple face and the Marshall Amplifier screams very much. It merely stops another (much worse) problem being added on top. She’s still in distress.

When I talked about it with the admin assistant in my team, I asked, 'So, what did you do when your kids had colic?'
'Drop kicked them off the balcony,' she said.