The colic-y stuff actually seems to be getting worse. He’s not so inconsolable now– we can get him to stay quiet as long as we are holding him, walking around, and singing to him. But the duration and frequency are increasing. The start of “cranky time” is creeping earlier and earlier, but it always seems to end between 10 and 11pm.
Cry-it-out is not an option. I mean, I’m morally opposed to it, but I get as tired and wrung out as anyone, and I have had to just put him down and let him scream for a little while a couple of times, to avoid violence. I believe the cry-it-out strategy is born of the unnatural situation that is the modern nuclear family– i.e. not enough women in the household to take care of an infant. This is a curious historical/cultural anomaly. I think it’s inevitable that women must sometimes leave their babies to cry, because we don’t all have the mental fortitude to hold an inconsolable, screaming, refusing-to-nurse child for three straight hours without hurting it. But I also think it is very, very wrong for “experts” to address this strategy as something good for the child. It’s an inevitable evil. But there’s no way this is the norm– the best thing– for the human animal. No other animal would do this: the babe would be eaten!
That’s not why we can’t let him cry it out. Obviously, the wolves aren’t going to get him, here. But the couple of times I’ve had to do that, we’ve ended up with the landlady/neighbors at our door. And if you thought having an infant screaming in your ear was bad, try communicating what’s wrong with him to your landlady in an unfamiliar language WHILE he is screaming in your ear. Or trying to understand your neighbors’ suggestions for home remedies, and communicate back that you understand, and that you’ll try it. Or having the screaming occasionally punctuated by an anonymous neighbor lady yelling across the lobby to let me know what a bad mother I am (yeah, my Spanish sucks, but some things come through crystal clear). So it’s good that he’s actually consolable these days. But it’s grueling. It’s getting to be five hours at a time of walking him up and down the lobby, singing anything that comes to mind (lullabies, Patsy Cline, the communion hymn from church…)– because for five hours if he’s not being actively comforted, he’s screaming. At the end of the day I crawl into bed and pass out, praying that the next day will be better… and lately the next day has always been just a little bit worse.
Just to complicate things, my husband has developed severe lower back pain and can’t carry the baby, so only I can do the walking part. He has been filling in by doing the stuff Piglet has been preventing me doing: like cooking dinner and washing the dishes.
The Cusquena ladies’ remedy for colic (it didn’t work for me, but hey, anything’s worth a try!) is to chew a little peppermint leaf, spit it into a little water, and feed the baby a couple of small spoonfuls of the water (not the leaf).
At least he’s sleeping well at night. He wakes up to eat at 3:30 and 6:30 like clockwork. And I’m so tired these days that even our wailing abuela neighbor can’t keep me up.
In the mornings, when Piglet is in a good mood, I’m beginning to see little signs of communication. He seems to actually understand me when I say “are you hungry?”– he goes into his little tongue-out, head-bobbing nursey-face routine. And when he gets all squirmy and grunty and I ask if he wants to go potty, he calms down a little, and his facial expression changes. That didn’t work out well this morning, I admit: he squirmed and grunted, I put him on the potty, and he totally freaked out and yelled. He was hungry, and the potty was not where he wanted to be. But I hadn’t misread him: as soon as I took him off the potty he peed all over me and the changing pad and the bed…
He’s also started imitating us, just a little. Sometimes if you stick your tongue out at him, he sticks his tongue out. And most of the time, if he’s in a good mood, we can make clicky noises at him, and he’ll make clicky noises back to us.
We took him to the botica this morning, and weighed me holding him, and me without him. Not the most accurate way to measure the baby, but after translating out of the metric, the boy weighs roughly sixteen and a half pounds. Most of it in his thighs. The curious thing, though, is that I now weigh less than I did before the pregnancy. I started at 120 (naked), and now weigh about 117: and that’s while wearing shoes, a floor-length denim skirt, and the five meters of jersey cotton that I am using to carry Piglet around in. So it’s entirely possible I’m under 115 now. I’m not sure what to make of that, when my boobs are bigger than ever, my belly is still on the paunchy side, and breastfeeding makes me hungry all the time, so I’ve been eating like a horse. I think a lot of it is muscle atrophy.
In better news, my blood sugars seem to have stabilized. I’m guessing the crazy low glucose numbers are what make so many people give up on a low-carb diet. Those first few days can be really brutal. But I’m very, very glad I stuck it out, because now that my numbers are consistently in the 70s and 80s both before and after meals, I feel so much better. If I were still randomly plummeting into the 40s and 50s, I don’t think I could handle Piglet’s cranky spells at all. It’s a little disappointing to find that my blood sugars don’t appear to be the cause (and therefore the cure) of his ills, but… stable blood sugars are good for both of us anyway.