No Muss, No Fuss

I wish!

No Muss?

This is the hole in my wall:

Centex will fix it but when is anyone's guess.


No Fuss?

This is my adorable, fussy baby daughter:

Yeah, I know...she looks happy there. Don't let the drama queen fool you.

The doctor's appointment was useless. What a sour, humorless pediatrician! She basically offered me no tips, no strategies, no information. She even suggested that maybe I was tense (uh, no...I'm very relaxed with my baby...if I'm tense, it is due to you) and implied that it was because DH is deployed.

I've been reading up a lot and the connection between a tense mom and a crying baby has been disproven. Sometimes moms get tense BECAUSE the baby is crying, but the mother's parenting does not cause the colic.

Despite the inept doctor, I am starting to feel a little better about handling this. Partly this is because supposedly her crying is now peaking and should start to reduce soon. Also, after reading stories of TRUE colic, I am relieved. If Lilah actually cried three hours straight (or even more than ten minutes straight), I would develop colic.

Perhaps this is because Lilah has trained me so well as to how to soothe her. Between the white noise CD, the swaddling, the swing, and the "babywearing," I am able to keep Lilah calm (which is necessary with her heart condition).

At any rate, I am grateful that although she requires LOTS of soothing to get to sleep, she actually sleeps 3-5 hours at a time at night.

Unfortunately, she punctuates her first and second night sleep shift with a marathon two hours of extremely alert wakefulness.

Following the advice in the books, I do not talk to her and try to avoid meeting her gaze at this time to signal it is sleep time.

This is impossible as everytime I glance over, she stares back at me like the twins on The Shining. "Come play with me, Mommy."

I swaddle her. She looks like a little mental patient. If she accepts a pacifier (which she rarely does), she looks like a pink, mini Hannibal Lechter. Perhaps she is getting ready early for Halloween?

I pretend to go to sleep; Lilah is not fooled by this ruse and begins to fuss.

I remember reading about a fanatically religious woman who thought her baby was possessed. At 2:30 am, as Lilah watches me with big, intense eyes, I could almost understand where she was coming from.

At the last cardiologist appointment, I had asked if open-eyed REM is normal (it is). The doctor jokingly asked, "Well have you see her head spin around 360 degrees? No? Then it is normal."

As Lilah continues to stare, I imagine calling the doctor, "Uh, you know when you joked about the head spinning thing...?"