Sanity. It is a word that seems to simple to say yet very hard to maintain when you have two young children. It’s been almost 7 week since I gave birth to my youngest son. He is an adorable ball of mush who loves to be snuggled. He has started to smile and respond to my voice. He is fascinated with his older brother and his older brother thinks that its very cool to be a “big helper”. As a mother it is very sweet to witness. However, that lovely word of sanity comes back into play. My sanity tends to escape me around 5pm or 6pm each night when, over the past few weeks, my adorable little ball of mush son turns into a screaming and crying baby.
Colic is an evil five letter word to every parent. In the beginning I was under the impression that if I just changed his formula it would make things easier for him and by extension the rest of us. Changing his formula has helped- it has taken away any colicky behavior that we saw during the day… then the witching hour comes. Sanity goes out the window. While my little one is progressively getting better, preparing for those rough hours, at times, feels like going into battle every night. I try as best I can to stay ahead of it, but realistically I know I’ll be up and down dealing with crying bouts until 7pm or 8pm when he finally settles down.
One night, during a particularly awful colic bout, I sat in the bedroom with my little boy and I just cried right along with him. It broke my heart to see him like this. Think about it: my little boy was born premature, he had spent 6 days in the NICU, he dealt with gas issues, he had just gotten over his first nasty cold. Now he has to deal with colic? It didn’t seem fair. I couldn’t do anything for him except just hold him, rock him, bath him, try and sooth him until he finally cried it all out. Why did he have to deal with this? Why do I have to deal with this? Then reality hit me- this won’t last forever. Most babies will grow out of colic by 3 months. My son is almost 7 weeks at this point so I am half way through the “terrible” part. I then started to think, a year from now I will miss him being so little; five years from now, I won’t be able to hold him the way that I am now; ten years from now he will be off and running after his friends. At the end of the day things will get better. I wiped away my tears and took a deep breath.
As the nights go by, my little one is getting better. Instead of four hour battles of colic, I have gotten them down to two and I have no doubt that soon they will be non-existent. At the end of the day, I have realized that I only get so much time with my boys when they are just that- boys. Dealing with colic is hard, awful and emotional but in all this turmoil, I realized that I am lucky enough to have two beautiful boys who have made me a better person. Sanity can be a hard concept to keep focus on with a screaming baby, but because of my boys it is one that I will never lose.
