Coping with Colic

Colic is a b*#!%--to put it politely. The past few nights have been filled with unconsolable crying for hours on end. And that has just been me. Harper's colic is a whole different issue. What a horrible trick colic is. The more I read up about it, the more I come to the conclusion there's not much you can do but cope. That's tough, especially when you don't do well when things are out of your control. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to understand how to cope with colic while it "rides its course" back to Hell.

Understanding the causes of colic helped me to seperate the crying from who my baby really is. As I understand it, colic is inconsolable crying by an otherwise healthy baby. In premature babies, it is believed that colic may be the result of immature digestive tracts, which cause gassy build up in your baby.

Before setting out to learn more about colic, my wife and I tried to calm our daughter's cries by constantly feeding her, changing her diaper, burping her, holding her, singing to her, on and on and on . . .with no success. During her first episode, I had to carry Harper from the bassinet in our bedroom to the crib in her nursery and let her cry while my wife and I sobbed from frustration, exhaustion, and a sense of helplessness (Was she crying because we were bad parents?). Surely not, but we didn't realize it then.

After our second night of listening to those colicky cries, I started looking for answers. That's when I learned that there is a limit to what you can do. Fortunately, there are things to do to ease the symptoms of colic. Swaddling, burping, and side/stomach holding are suggested, but the first signs of reprieve for us have come from an iPod. White noise, commonly associated with vaccums, radios, and air conditioners, has a tendency to calm crying babies. The idea came to my wife and I to Google search "free downloadable white noise mp3" and load a looped track onto an old iPod. We played that baby right next to Harper's crib all night long. Man, the sound of a washing machine has never sounded so sweet.

We listened to the faint, cyclical hum through the baby monitor that we put next to the crib and noticed a decrease in crying. For those instances where our daughter really kicked her crying into gear, and there was nothing more we could do, the monitor volume went down and the washing machine went up. We could still hear her crying, and responded to her needs, but simply moving her from our bedside and into her nursery next door was the best thing we could have done to start coping with colic.