Parenting: Month 4

Working with an abacus a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

This month saw the 100 day milestone come and go. And T is still colicy The Dr. Sears books mention that colic is a description and not a diagnosis, meaning that it is a description of a case where they cry for hours a day, with no consistent explanation of why (if there was an explanation, you would provide that as a diagnosis instead of colic). The current pediatrician statement is he is gassy (as opposed to reflux, and certainly not allergies, as he is continuing to grow) It also means that he still wakes up several times a night, and we look jealously on our friends who boast that their babies sleep through the night.

The other side of it is he is a babbler. I get a couple good conversations a day. We get a few laughing episodes a day. But his fussiness makes us reluctant to bring him anywhere.

Some thoughts:

1. Parenting an infant is a contact sport. A baby can only communicate by crying and touch. So the only way to communicate is listen to the baby's crying, or holding the baby, feeling his movements and noticing variations. My wife, who spends an order of magnitude more time than I doing this, especially at night, is regularly days ahead of me in noticing changes.

2. He definitely likes being held upright. The pediatrician says it is because he is gassy, and this makes it that much easier to get the air out. The problem is that he is a big boy, and we're running out of people in the household who can hold him for any length of time.

3. Waiting for the day when he sleeps through the night. But we hope that it is not much longer.

4. He is colicky. By definition it means that the issue/cause of crying changes frequently, so what worked yesterday may not work today. (ref. 1 the fact that daddy is a few days behind is actually a significant issue) So parenting is not only a contact sport, it is association football where the clock does not stop, not American football where you get timeouts.

5. My wife and I tend to treat parenting as an opposed contest. Us against baby as we figure things out along the way (with the reward at any given point in time being a happy, playful, laughing, thriving baby). (See Ayelet Waldman's Modern Love essay) Also reminds me of T.E. Lawrence 27 Articles (I may write a post based on that someday. Counter-insurgency seems like a very good metaphor for having a newborn in the house.)