Rebecca: What Colic's Really Like
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Wondertime's interview with Rebecca, mother of Jill, (both shown left) who was 2 1/2 months old at the time.
Wondertime: How old was Jill when she started acting colicky?
Right from the first week. She had to be held constantly. My grandmother flew down from Connecticut and basically held her on the couch for three weeks until we brought her to the doctor and said, "What's going on here?"
She wouldn't sleep. You'd put her down and within 15 minutes she was awake and crying. We split the shift up because her great-grandmother didn't want to let go during the day. I had the graveyard shift. And at night she would wake up and I would feed her and she wouldn't sleep in her basket. I had to actually sleep sitting up in bed. For the first month. All night.
And we tried different things. I finally got her to sleep for about three days on the changing pad: I sat that in between my husband and me, and just kind of put my face on the changing pad so she could feel me. For three days she was fine, and then she wouldn't do that anymore. And so I had to sleep sitting up.
She finally started to get a little bit better at night. I think she started sleeping a lot at night because she was so exhausted during the day, because she never took naps. Never ever. Maybe two 15- to 20-minute naps per day, which is not near what a newborn needs.
Wondertime: And you need your sleep too!
Yeah, because I have a 3-1/2-year-old. It was really hard with my son Maxwell, because he needed my attention as well. I think that between the two of them that tore me up the most, because I knew Jill would eventually grow out of the colic, but Maxwell had been number 1 in our lives for 3 1/2 years.
As a parent, when you have a second child, you feel that you're more ready, you're more excited, you're not so nervous because you know what to expect. You think, "Oh, this is going to be great. This time I'm going to enjoy it more."
Maxwell had a milk allergy, so he cried the first five weeks, for like 8 to 10 hours a day. So, with Jill, I thought, This is going to be great. And then it turned out that it wasn't so great. When you have another child that you have to worry about, it's not like you can really sit on the couch all day. That's what I was doing, literally sitting on the couch all day, just holding her because she wouldn't sleep. It was very, very difficult.
It's gotten a lot better. I'm finding different ways to soothe her, and all through it, she's really got a good personality, she's very funny, and she's very happy despite all of it when she feels good. It's been an interesting experience.
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