Baby Don't Cry

This was NOT a good day to be the first morning that I went off to work and Val was left home alone with our mini Cooper. Let's just say that the noise that comes out of his mouth when he's unhappy is anything but mini. He's the most important thing in our lives now, and so cute and cuddly and more awesome than I could ever imagine, but for real, we'll be making him feel guilty about this for decades to come.  

Starting last week, Cooper started having crying fits for an hour or so, almost inconsolable. You have to change positions constantly and try to keep him distracted, which can work for several minutes, until he remembers that he's unhappy about something. You can change him, feed him, walk around, sit in the rocker, it doesn't matter. It could be his tummy, except that he only does it once or twice a day.

And this isn't just crying; we're talking about the wailing of a baby that makes you question why you volunteered for this duty. That two hours of crying threatens to negate the 22 other hours of the day that he coos adorably. And yet the crying can be so pitiful as to be adorable, too. He has several different versions, one of which is this rat-a-tat cry that only reduces me and Val to goo because it sounds so sad.

I don't know if we fit the definition of Cooper having colic, but it certainly seems like it. According to Wikipedia the definition is "a condition in which an otherwise healthy baby cries or screams frequently and for extended periods without any discernible reason." The good news? "The condition ... almost invariably disappears, often very suddenly, before the baby is three to four months old." I'm sure that's what our pediatrician will tell us tomorrow for his two-week checkup.

This morning Squirmy McFussybritches started one of his episodes about 12:30. By 1:30 Val came to wake me up because she didn't know what to do anymore. For the next hour and a half I tried to do what I could, to mixed success and failure. By 3 it was time for his feeding, and that seemed to calm him down, but by that time I had to get ready for work, and leave Val with a look of terror on her face. Thankfully he eventually let her get some sleep. My poor darling. I can only hope that Cooper only cries uncontrollably like that when I'm at home and that he sleeps and acts cute the nine hours I'm away. 

It was a lot easier when I was home for the first 12 days and could take the late-night shift, we traded sleep schedules, and my Mom-in-law stayed with us several days to help out. Monday afternoon when I got home from work and Cooper was in hour two of a three-hour fit, even she looked a bit confused and frayed, understandably. I took him outside to watch golfers hack their way up the fairway in our backyard and let Val and her mom eat lunch, figuring that the golfers can't care that much if Cooper's unhappy, and if they do, deal with it because you're not Tiger in need of perfect silence, and I would tell Tiger to stick it, too. He has kids, he'd understand.

The 18-20 hours that Cooper does sleep, he's so adorable, with both of his hands pointed up towards his ears and making cute baby noises. When he's really tired he sleeps so soundly that we can barely keep him awake long enough to eat. The first several days Cooper would only cry and turn bright red when we changed his diaper.

Of course, he has to wake up sometime on his own, and this is what transpires:

"Code Red, the baby is waking up! Will he be happy? Will he have a messy diaper? How do you keep a one-week old baby entertained? Get out the swing! Get out the bouncer! Kill a woolly mammoth! Whatever it takes!"

Soooo ... two weeks down, about a million to go?