little feet, big sky

The awful infant swing comes with a different “melodies”, though I wonder who might consider those sounds melodious. I tend to pick something on the nature channel, depicted by what I’m guessing is supposed to be a bird. The first three “tracks” sound vaguely like water running, terribly electronic in their tinkling. I have no idea what the fourth one is supposed to be, but it sounds a bit like an old dial-up modem, complete with handshake signal. The fifth is what I select, and assume to be white noise, which works perfectly for putting Spice into this happy, hypnotic state to doze off to.

The problem? The spouse hates it.

Turns out, what sleepologists everywhere suggest for getting babies and adults to sleep sends my spouse into painful, teeth-grinding nightmare… when he can get to sleep. This has led to several scenarios taking place in our house, all variations on the spouse turning down or off the noise and the baby waking up or not falling off to sleep as easily.

So, I’ve resorted to trying other things. Loud, repetitive sounds seem to be the key. I tried Ozzy in the car with limited success; seems I’m more soothed by it than her. My mother burned me a CD with classical Indian music which works well enough that I haven’t removed it from the car to copy to my computer for fear that I might forget to put it back in the car. Yesterday, she calmed to Morrissey, though that might just have been from horror at my chipper sing-a-long with The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Bob Marley’s Is This Love was only a minor success, so perhaps her tastes aren’t fully developed yet. We’ve also tried birdsongs, jungle river, tropical rain, thundering rainstorms, thunderbolts and lightning… mamma mia.

This morning I scoured Amazon’s MP3 Downloads looking for something like womb sounds. Most of what I found was cheesy crap, stuff a deaf baby would scream to turn off. Then I found it, the perfect baby-calming track, an hour-long continuous heartbeat to the sound of waves. Amazing. Spice calmed and gurgled to the preview, so I splurged on all $.99 of it.

While his father was recently here visiting the baby, the spouse and him set up the downstairs guest bedroom as the movie-watching room. (Futon = bed OR couch.) They set the new projector up, and hardwired surround-sound speakers to the wall. Now, thanks to the Blu-Ray feature on the PS3, we have an amazing setup for watching movies at home, which is great since we probably won’t make it to the theater for, oh, about a decade.

With Spice’s swing in there, she now gets the full surround-sound experience of swinging to a steady heartbeat and enough waves to drown a whale. I think I’ll start calling it the “womb room”…

Spice hit 7 weeks this past Monday and wow, has it been a wild ride!

They say that colic in babies peaks at 6 weeks and drops slowly from there, and as usual, she’s been a textbook baby. Last week was a right mess, hence my impulse trip to see Mom and get away for a while. (Though, considering she came with me, I’m not sure what exactly I was getting away from. Hmm.)

This week has been a little better. The spouse has been a little better, which always helps. I’m sure Spice has been going through a growth spurt because she feeds constantly all day. I used to wonder what that meant. How could a baby feed constantly? Wouldn’t they need to come up for air? Or stop to sleep? In case you’ve wondered these same questions, the answer is, in fact, no. They can pause long enough to stare past you out the window for a few minutes and as soon as you reach to pull your shirt back down, they latch on with a vengeance. They are capable of disarming you with a half-smile, breathing through the corners of their mouth and then lazily feeding for another 20 minutes. And sleeping works about the same: cat-nap for a bit with the breast in the mouth and wake up as soon as they’re moved or wake up an hour later to start all over again. I’ve never been so damn repetitious in my life; “She can’t possibly be hungry again!”

But I was rambling about fussiness.

In the breastfeeding support group I was going to, the bible seemed to be Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block ($11). I remember seeing this on Amazon a few times, but skimmed past it thinking that since it was so mainstream, it couldn’t possibly be worth the $11 bucks. Ah, how wrong I frequently am. :-) The same day that I read it, I tried the 5 steps in the book and was amazed at how calm Spice was. And I also realized that we had been doing many of these steps unintentionally, but with the same calming results.

The 5 steps are basically swaddling, side/stomach positioning, swinging, shhh’ing and sucking. If you’ve been around babies before, it’s nothing new, but Karp’s technique is to put them together in a way that makes them more effective than each used alone. We had been swaddling occasionally with good results. Swinging was effective when I was wearing her in a wrap/sling. Sucking worked on the breast and with co-sleeping and nursing at night, we sleep on our sides, tummy-to-tummy. Her body is tucked so tightly against me, that it’s almost like being swaddled. No wonder nights have been so easy for us!

Do read the book. Spice is a relatively easy baby, meaning she often cries for food, a diaper change, or needing to sleep, and rarely for random fussiness or real colic. For the times she has actually been fussy, Karp’s technique has been a sanity-saver.

If you don’t want to plunk down the $$, read it in your local library or rent it from Paperspine.