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Originally Posted by Bea-Arthurs Hip
My question to the group, have any of you had a colicky baby? Did they after growing out of it and develop temper problems? Will it ever end?
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Oh goodness, you have my deepest sympathy.
Been there, done that, damned near didn't survive it.
The best line I heard on the subject went something like this: There are two kinds of parents: those who've had a child with colic & those without. Here's how you tell them apart, when you mention that your baby has colic, you'll get one of two responses:
Those who've never been through it say "Oh, that's too bad"
Those who HAVE been through it say "Oh God is there anything we can do to help?"
Yes, I promise, it DOES end (just never soon enough). And no, it does NOT predict future behavior. Amazing as it may seem to those who know me, my son is one of the kindest, gentlest, most "people-pleasing" oriented people I've ever seen ... after three months of the living hell that is colic.
I've got to run out to dinner now, but I'll try to pass back through the thread with a few tips/tricks (99.9% of which won't work unfortunately) & any other support I can offer, but I wanted to at least reassure you that, once the colic ends, you aren't living with a demonspawn or anything like that.
edit to add: By now you've probably gotten suggestions for every crazy colic home remedy known to man & beast alike. If your case is like ours, very little will work except time. For us, it was about a 3 month torture, starting from about a week old. How bad was it? (hoo boy, this could be a looooong list)
-- it was so bad that my wife & I actually fought for several days running over whose turn it was to go next door & pick up the neighbors mail while they were on vacation. That five minute chore was the only guaranteed quiet five minutes either of us knew existed & they were more precious than gold.
-- it was so bad that I checked the Atlanta phone book (white pages AND yellow pages) ... would you believe that there's not one single Gypsy listed in the whole freakin' phone book (borrowed from the old boogey-man story about "I'm gonna give you to the gypsies if you don't behave)
-- It was so bad that one night we drove around for nearly three hours, from 1am til 4am, after discovering that the motion of the car was about the only thing that brought relief to the baby & therefore ending the crying. As soon as the car was put in park, literally the instant, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!.
-- It was so bad that a UPS deliveryman almost lost his life after ringing our doorbell around 4p one afternoon for a late delivery, waking up baby, mom, and dad & hitting the WTF-DO-YOU-WANT?!?!?! sweepstakes in the process.
If he were just a half-step slower, I'd have caught him by the throat as I tried to do. (from that day until the colic ended, a "Do Not Ring Bell - Sleeping Baby" sign was kept handy for posting on the front door)
Looking back, the thing that really doesn't sink in
while its going on but that you think about later, is that the baby is pretty much in agony during the attacks (for us, that was a period from about sundown until just before sunrise). That doesn't make the screaming more tolerable, just maybe more understandable in hindsight.
Of all the countless tricks & tips we got, only a couple seemed to do much good.
1) Put a towel in the dryer, get it nice & warm (nearly hot), roll it up kinda like you would if you were making a pillow for yourself, and place it on the baby's tummy, applying just a little bit of pressure. For as long as the towel stays really warm, the combination of heat & pressure relieved the pain at least a little bit, enough to turn the screams down to fussing & whimpers. We spent quite a few nights running a virtual relay from the baby to the dryer.
2) The car thing was pretty successful, although it's pretty impractical to try to drive for hours on end, especially with the price of gas these days. We never found a really successful substitute for that motion, but maybe your luck might be better.
3) The thing that helped most for us was discovering that he had an extremely high iron level, abnormally high even for a newborn/infant. He was a formula baby 100% & today's pediatrician's are absolutely fanatical about loading as much iron as possible to infants. Luckily, we found one pedia that had experienced uber-iron levels in baby's before & when we switched to special low-iron formula, it reduced our problems by a good 20%. Didn't make the colic go away, but it did cut down on stomach problems that were contributing to his misery index.
Of all the suggestions we got, the worst one was probably "put the baby in a warm bath". That resulted in a transformation from a screaming baby to a wet screaming baby ... not a positive change, trust me.
Like I said at the beginning though, it
does end, in our case, completely unexpectedly & out of the blue. It didn't taper off, no real change, just POOF, one day it was gone, no more "House That Dreaded Sundown" for us.
You'll make it, even if you don't really
want to at times, you'll make it.
And it won't take long for the inevitable comparisons to Linda Blair to be relegated to nothing more than a horrifying memory.