Those colicky evenings

Colic. My old enemy… It’s back. And it’s bigger and badder than before.

He screams. I feed him. He screams. I rock him. He screams. I burp him. He screams. I pace with him. He screams. Brodie rocks, burps, paces with him. He screams. I cuddle him. He screams. And screams. And screams some more. Fierce. Angry. Mad. Furious at the world. Fighting, fighting until he eventually passes out from exhaustion. A brief moment or two of blissful silence. Then a spasm and he jerks wide awake. Immediately resuming the tirade. He squirms constantly. He screws up his face and kicks his legs frantically in a futile attempt to evict the painful wind. Arms flail wildly dispensing quite vicious blows. Often walloping himself in the face too. When he’s not totally immersed in his own little world of pain he looks mournfully at us between wails. As if this might be something we should be able to remedy for him, and he can’t understand why we aren’t – callous parents that we are. So he increases the intensity and volume just to register his unhappiness with the parental service he’s receiving. Torture all round.

It’s not that I forgot the colic-filled evenings with the Rascal, but the reality of living through them again with Boo is like a bucket of ice-cold water in the face. That screaming. It’s never-ending. Every. Single. Evening. “The Rascal wasn’t this bad!” laments my husband. I remind him of all the things we once tried. Baby massage, Infacol, Colief, Gripe Water (the real stuff – imported via UK cousin), diet elimination, voodoo, the works. What solved the problem ultimately? Absolutely nothing but Time. “This too shall pass”, they say. I’ve seriously considered beating ‘them’ about the head with their platitudes as my head rings with incessant wailing in my ears.

We’ll spend a couple of hours pacing, tapping, rocking, repositioning to be rewarded with echoing belches and liquidy farts. The nappy fills up. One of us changes it. More liquidy farts. More belching. An eruption of sour milk all over him, us, the general surroundings. A pause as he gurgles and chokes out the last of it before looking up innocently as I curse. There’s nothing quite like that beautiful content smile your baby gives you… just after they’ve soiled their fresh nappy and drowned you in vomit. Again. And then there are those stealth pukes. Where he waits until I glance away or am in the middle of covering up after a feed. His timing is perfect. Puke going everywhere while I’m one-handed.

“Baby colic (also known as infantile colic) is defined as episodes of crying for more than three hours a day for more than three days a week for three weeks in an otherwise healthy child between the ages of two weeks and four months.” – Wikipedia

Colic. The useful catch-all for ‘Your baby won’t stop crying, but no one can find anything actually wrong with them. Good luck with that’. My unqualified opinion is that it’s a question of waiting it out for a slowly developing digestive system with our sons. It was impossible to burp the Rascal and his nappies were terrible shades of green to yellow. Boo can produce epic burps and consistent mustard nappies, but he has a constant stream of gas waiting to erupt. He’s a big baby. He feeds a LOT, gaining 1870g of weight in his first 6 weeks. And he is also LOUD. Very fricking loud. I literally get a headache after about half an hour of him crying in my ears.

There’s really very little to do about it other than hope that the worst will be past by the 3 month mark. So *$%* you, colic. Anyone got a good set of ear plugs?