colic – Postulates & Pastimes

My happy place doesn’t involve little people, grammas or blondes in lingerie

I envy people with good children like I envy the obscenely rich and their crack-addict washboard abs. That is to say that, I would probably smoke crack (do you smoke it?) if it meant I could have abs like the stars. Which means, there’s little I probably wouldn’t do to have kids that minded me, that didn’t throw fits if they couldn’t watch Scooby Doo at 6 a.m.; that didn’t scream and wail in the car seat after an hour, and who didn’t sulk like I just tanned their hides with daddy’s narrow leather belt each time we tried to get them to go to church where we hope to both introduce them to other “Godlike” children and perhaps get a little Jesus in the process. I dunno, lofty goals perhaps.

It’s no secret that I feel that raising children is something best left for the likes of Mother Teresa, or perhaps even Gandhi (that is, if Gandhi hadn’t lived in abject poverty), who seem capable of meeting even the most vile of situations with an outward calm that–I personally believe–likely hid an inner desire to pick up a stick and beat the crap out of the other person. But they LOOKED calm and that’s what matters.

Anyway, CareerMom and I, until this past year, have been the only ones of her six other brothers and sisters who have reared boys. Everyone else–girls. And while yes, there was drama, there was never any of the problems we’ve lived through. For instance, remember the Infamous beach vacation of ’07 (Part 1 and Part 2), well, while everyone else was upstairs with their darling little girls having a grand old time, we were downstairs with two exhausted boys, including one baby who wouldn’t stay asleep for more than 15 minutes at a time–each time waking up and screaming at the top of his lungs.

The other siblings, and to a large part even both CareerMom and my parents, have never understood our reluctance to travel. They don’t live through the sleepless nights, the miserable car trips, etc., that we go through each time just to make someone else happy. (On a sidenote, I have since learned to not give a rat’s butt what anyone else wants. If I don’t want to go, I don’t go. CareerMom is optional. Life is too short to be miserable.)

This all changed with the birth of a boy to CareerMom’s next oldest sister. She had a boy. And not just any boy..a HOSS of a boy. In the past year CareerMom and I have sat back and grinned as her sister has regaled the family with his latest exploits and most recently, when her family took a trip to South Carolina, I couldn’t wait to copy CareerMom on her sister’s FaceBook update that said,

“…just stopped at a random park in NC to give the kids a break from the car…we got to take a miniature train ride!”

This may seem minute to you, but I also happen to know that he’d been cranky in the car a good bit of the trip, so for them to stop…well, that’s just a little bit of Gold in my book!

Shall I apologize for finding solace in another’s misery? Should I feel bad that someone else is finally understanding–even if just a wee bit–what CareerMom and I have been trying to explain to others for five years? Maybe so, but I won’t!

And here in just two short months, we’ll have a little girl around the house and I PRAY, OH Dear Lord, I PRAY, that we get one of those darling little sleepers and not another personality like the last two. I’m not sure I can take another six months of colic!

Every little thing (s)he does is magic…

Our second baby boy is almost six months old this month (19th). He’s beautiful, a joy, all the proper adjectives a loving parent could wish for. But he’s not been the easiest baby we’ve known. Since his birth, we’ve survived nearly 14 weeks of colic, and all the fun that comes with. We’ve made it through his first two teeth coming in, the drool, the biting, the whining. Diaper rash, the sniffles, some puking…the works.

After six months of saying, “Nope, no more kids,” we finally started getting a bit of a reprieve. Lo, he started sleeping at night.

He’s been holding himself up for months so we felt pretty safe putting him on his tummy where slept like…well, a baby. Now he’s sitting up and playing on his own and if he could just coordinate the arm pushups with the legs pushes, he’d be crawling.

And that, my friends, is where our newest challenge comes from. See, he doesn’t like sleeping on his back, so when you lay him down in his crib at night, you have to put him on his tummy or he immediately wakes up. The last few nights, however, as soon as we put him down on his tummy, he tucks his legs under him and pushes his butt up in the air. Sometimes he’ll just stay like that, and heaven-forbid you try and straighten his legs out, because 9 out of 10 times, you’ll wake him up. Instead, you just cover him up and pray he sleeps.

For the last two nights, he’s awakened himself by rolling over during his sleep and since he doesn’t like sleeping on his back, he wakes up and cries. We go in, cuddle him quietly, give him a sip of bottle and down he goes…only to wake up again a couple of hours later. The last two nights, we’ve gotten up four times both nights. This can’t go on.

Last night, we even tried the beloved swing, which we don’t generally like to use, but which usually works for 5-6 hours. No dice. Every 1.5-3 hours he woke up. I know babies are a challenge, but my Lord, can’t a parent catch a break? This is particularly troublesome because my wife is traveling for four days next month, leaving lil’ ol me to answer the midnight calls. I’m considering earplugs and tough love. Cuz remember, I tried tough love by itself a month ago when my wife traveled and I didn’t have earplugs. After 45 mins, I gave in.

You know what we need, a “Baby Whisperer.” Is there a TV show for that on the Discovery Channel? (Holy Crap! There is!) Here

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