Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks

If nothing else works, cuddle. Most babies love being cuddled. They can be so full of food they look as though they will burst. They can be amused and entertained to the point of coma. They can gurgle at brightly coloured pieces of plastic attached to their cot for only so long. But they can't be cuddled enough. They crave physical affection. Some fathers find it hard to give, maybe because they weren't given enough themselves when they were babies. That was the wisdom then; we know better now. Even if it is colic and the baby won't stop crying for three months, you will glean the benefit of all that cuddling when the colic does subside. 
 

Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks

One day the baby will look up at you and smile, and everything will be as it should be. And the baby will never know that on 63 separate occasions you wanted to throw it out of the window. (Unless you did throw it out of the window.) If you can learn to comfort your baby as well as your partner can - which usually only takes perseverance and the will to do it - you will be amazed by how satisfying it is. 

Some fathers discover, to their vain delight, that they are better at comforting their child than their partners. It helps to be as relaxed as possible as you rock them out of their misery and, with luck, into a long deep sleep. I find that half a bottle of red wine helps, but each to his own.

Sleep

A newborn baby knows no night, knows no day. For a while you will be in the same terrible state of flux. It's like infinite jetlag. New parents talk of little else. Newish parents start talking about something else, then give up and go back to sleep deprivation. They are too tired to think. Their feet drag, their shoulders slump. Their eyes are like pissholes in the snow. Their babies, needless to say, are full of life and energy. The babies are getting the sleep they need. It's the parents who are losing their minds, their youth, their grip on reality. 

You think you look rough now? Look again in a year's time. Your closest relatives won't know it's you - and not because you'll have had plastic surgery and fled the country to avoid your responsibilities. The shitty nappies may not get to you; the lack of sleep will.

I am writing this on a Wednesday morning. The last four nights I have had five hours, six hours, four and a half hours and five and a half hours' sleep respectively. My daughter is four and a half, and my son will soon be two. We should be past the worst of it by now. But we aren't. Sadly I had a bit to drink last night I am therefore a little hungover and rather bad-tempered. In the mirror this morning I looked older than my late grandfather. After lunch I shall go to the local public library, where there's an unusually comfortable armchair ...

This post will be split into handy gobbet-sized chunks for the convenience of sleep-deprived parents who may not be able to digest more than a single paragraph at a time.
 
THEY SLEEP AND THEY SLEEP AND THEY SLEEP 

It's true - newborn babies sleep an awful lot. On average, according to Desmond Morris, they snooze for 16 hours and 36 minutes every day. This figure starts to fall almost immediately, but even five-year-olds should put in twelve solid hours. And yet newborn baby sleep is a fragile thing. Between half and two-thirds of it is light sleep, from which they can wake depressingly easily. 

Even the way they go to sleep is different. As overworked adults, we can hit the pillow, pass out and be snoring like warthogs within eight to ten seconds. Babies, by contrast start with 20 minutes or so of light sleep before descending into big fat sleep, and it is only then that they truly settle. You may have to rock your little one and/or sing rude songs to ease the passage into deep sleep. Only when their eyes have stopped twitching is it safe to leave the room. Then you step on the creaky floorboard outside, and the whole process begins again. To find out more, you can check out Baby Sleeping Too Much 6 Weeks.

 

Understanding Your Crying Baby

This post continues from the previous post.

4. Grandparents. Remember, grandparents are not just for Christmas, they are for the whole year round. Unfortunately, many young people are so desperate to get away from their parents that when they come to have children themselves they find they have moved 400 miles or more from free babysitting.
 

Understanding Your Crying Baby

This is a waste of a valuable resource. Few grandparents have anything much to do, and quite a few have enough money to enable them not to do it. So they might as well be taking your baby off your hands for a few hours, and perhaps 'lending' you a tenner so you can go to the cinema. If they start droning on about your spoiling the baby or teaching it bad habits, threaten to put them in a home. (Your parents will always be much better with your children than they were with you. They will give them millions of treats, the same treats in fact that they used to deny you, just as your grandparents gave you the same treats they denied your parents. This pattern can never be broken.)
 
5. Dummy. The 'D' word. Vast hairy stigmas have attached themselves to this harmless implement. Just as people who know nothing about language are vaguely aware that a split infinitive is A Bad Thing, so everyone knows that dummies are the tool of the devil. Serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Dr Harold Shipman both sucked dummies well into their teenage years. Possibly because we have all seen them being shoved into toddlers' mouths by fishwives in supermarkets, we may associate dummies with a more primitive level of parenthood than that to which we aspire. 

It's pure snobbery. Most childcare experts cannot bring themselves to recommend their use without a string of caveats (such as 'Don't use them at all'). But dummies - or pacifiers as Americans call them, with their matchless gift for euphemism - have been around for centuries.

You can see fifteenth-century dummies in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Only around a third of babies find a use for dummies, and it may only be a brief phase before baby finds and starts sucking its thumb. For some babies, though, dummies do the trick, and that has to be better than endless crying. The main thing is not to sweeten the dummy with fruit juice or honey (unless you don't mind having fat children with no teeth). Also, according to many books, you should sterilize the dummy before every use. Oh yes, you've definitely going to do that.

6. The cranial osteopath. This is not something your GP would necessary recommend, especially if he or she is the type who would rather put you on a course of antibiotics than work out what's wrong with you. But cranial osteopathy helped our youngest with his colic, and may do the job for you. The bones of the skull are not completely fused, even in adults. A cranial osteopath, by placing hands on the patient's head, claims to be able to feel minute rhythmic pulsations of the cranial hones and membranes. And if you remember how compressed a baby's skull is during birth, it makes sense that a little rudimentary connection of the head bones could improve matters. 

As one practitioner has put it, 'The natural tendency of the body is to heal itself. The cranial osteopath facilitates this process by helping to balance tissue tensions between his hands. The body then makes its own correction to a more tuned state.' I have watched one in action: they barely seem to do anything, and you begin to wonder whether you haven't been ripped off by the new age equivalent of a fairground charlatan. But babies love it. Cranial osteopathy did not cure our boy of his colic; it eased it. At the time, though, that was more than enough. To find out more, you can check out Understanding Your Crying Baby.

Soothe Your Crying Baby

Unfortunately you and I and everyone else who encounters colic must work on the assumption that it is a stomach ache because that is what it looks like and seems like. You would guess, as you watch your small person doubling up in pain, that he or she has eaten something appalling - a 20p piece, for instance, or the decayed remains of a small rodent. 
 

Soothe Your Crying Baby

But Junior is still on breast or bottle at this stage, so that can't be it. (It will be in a few months' time, when your baby starts experimenting with different foodstuffs - or 'foodstuffs', as the experts would probably call them.) There is simply no explanation for colic, and almost nothing you can do to relieve it. (Try laying your baby face down across your knees, support its little bawling head and gently massage its back. It might work, it might not.) 

Colic can drive you barmy. As the days stretch out to weeks and even months, you keep on wondering, what the bloody hell is wrong in there? You will never know. One day the colic will simply stop. A week later you will have forgotten your baby ever had it. Remarkably, colic seems to have no long-term effects on your baby's well-being or general good cheer. Indeed, soon after its disappearance is when many parents record their baby's first smile. It may be that colic is a rite of passage certain babies have to undergo. Their parents accompany them through it, endure it with them, celebrate when it's all over. As long as they haven't topped themselves in the meantime.
 
At least colic comes to an end. Teething, as one baby expert put it, 'starts at six months and goes on until the age of 20.' Unless your baby is one of those authoritarian political leaders born with a rogue tooth, you probably won't even have thought about dentition (another glorious technical term) until it happens.
 
Nonetheless, those teeth have been waiting under the gum since the womb, ready to strike. Their emergence provides a new and unexpected source of pain for baby, who will start frantically chewing on things to ease the discomfort. Teething babies also dribble a lot. They get bright red cheeks and can double as Belisha beacons. And they cry and cry and cry. You can put teething gel on their gums, give them something to chew other than your partner's nipple and wait for it to end. And then wait for it to begin again. Unlike colic, though, teething has an end-product: teeth.

You may miss the gummy look, and coo over old photographs of your little toothless one, but the teeth represent real, measurable progress. For instance, you can measure the indentation on your finger when baby bites you. Now it's someone else's turn to cry.

So how to soothe your crying baby? There are several well-tested methods. Billions of people have been testing them over thousands of years. Occasionally one of them works.
 
1. The supine position. Lie down on your back and lay your baby on your chest. They like the sound of the heartbeat, apparently. Rub your baby's back. Go to sleep. Snore like gurgling drain.

2. The tour of the house. Hold baby upright and lean him/her against your shoulder. (Make sure you have put a muslin there first to protect your clothes from dribble and rogue possets.) Wander around your home singing old pop songs badly. Blush when caught by partner.

3. Use a sling. For a tiny baby, get one that is made only of cloth. (The ones with aluminum exoskeletons are for babies of six months and older.) Strap in Junior and you can walk around, do the washing up, go to the pub, have sex with strangers in the park ... anything, really, as long as you keep moving, because that will loll Junior off to sleep. Babies love slings. Again, it's the contact, the beating heart, and Daddy's clothes smelling of sweat and drink. To find out more, you can check out Soothe Your Crying Baby.

Colic Baby Relief Symptoms

In the long run, then, it's not the crying that matters, it's how you react to the crying. The fact is, some babies will cry more than others. The circumstances of the birth might have a bearing on it. If the mother had a general anaesthetic, if baby was eased out with the mighty forceps, if baby had to endure a long labour . all these are believed to make babies cry more later on. Also, newborn boys often cry more than newborn girls. No one knows why: it just is.
 

Colic Baby Relief Symptoms

Which means, slightly terrifyingly, that there may not be a problem you can solve at all. You may simply have a baby that cries. These are not rational beings we are dealing with. They are not predictable. Baby cries. Pick up baby. Baby stops crying. Put baby down again. Baby starts crying again. Then, next time: baby cries. Pick up baby. Baby goes on crying. Put down baby. Baby stops crying. Partner picks up baby. Baby cries. Partner hands baby to you, Baby stops crying. Partner goes into sulk. And so on and so on. Every possible permutation of events is happening right now to some poor bastard of a parent within ten miles of where you are sitting.
 
Men, of course, tend to see life as a series of problems to be solved. And if a problem can't be solved? Even psychologists have noticed that fathers often deal less than brilliantly with a baby's emotional turmoil. 'A young father said, "I feed him, change him, play rough and tumble, I can't take any more." The mother was more in touch with the baby and could hold him and accept his distress. 

Father had to act to make it better and couldn't tolerate the distress,' What makes it worse is that, somehow, you feel that you are the only person who has ever had to endure this. You are not. Babies have cried for tens of thousands of years, and if anyone knew of a sure-fire cure, we might have heard about it by now. Indeed, around the world and throughout history, grown-ups have tried to put a different spin on crying babies, presumably to relieve their own suffering.

In Japan every spring they hold crying baby competitions, for they believe that the more a baby cries, the stronger and healthier it will be as an adult. In Christian tradition, if a baby cried at its baptism, that was a sign to everyone that the Devil was being driven away. And not at all a sign that the baby did not like being dunked head first in a fontful of greasy cold water.
 
One possible explanation for non-stop crying is colic. Or, as some of the books call it,'colic' (just as morning sickness is now 'morning' sickness). Many babies between the ages of three weeks and four months cry for no apparent reason. It usually strikes towards the end of the parenting day; when you are at your tiredest and most bad-tempered, but can crop up at other times of the day as well. It can last anything up to three or even four hours. It's called colic, a wonderfully old-fashioned name I always think, because colicky babies tend to pull their legs up and arch their backs as though they have severe stomach ache.

Many experts call it 'colic' with the inverted commas because no one knows what causes it, although they don't think it's stomachache. (A few experts won't even call it 'colic'. They call it 'what people understand by the term "colic"'. Any expert this detached from the parenting process can be safely ignored.)  To find out more, you can check out Colic Baby Relief Symptoms.

How To Deal With Baby Crying

What are you supposed to do with crying baby? The standard male response is to feign death and hope that someone else in the house will deal with it. One father I know looks for a woman, any woman, to sort out the problem, and that includes neighbours and passers-by. But suppose you are not in a position to delegate. Suppose it is you in the house alone, with a crying baby in the next room and an unread newspaper burning your fingertips. Is it the act of a responsible adult to hide your head under the cushion and/or turn the TV up to full volume? 
 

How To Deal With Baby Crying

Clearly not. So you go into the baby and pick it up, reasoning that it is better to do something than to do nothing, especially if you are to be called to account for your actions later on. In fact this is sound thinking. Even if you haven't the faintest idea what to do next, picking it up tells baby that you are there and you care. Baby does not know that the only thing you care about is baby shutting up. Baby does not need to know. Baby recognizes the love and affection you have to offer, and with a bit of luck, responds to it. Babies need cuddling as fiercely as they need food or sleep. Rocking and swaying and kissing and nuzzling might just do the trick.
 
A word here on general policy. It's important when a baby cries not to convince yourself that he or she is trying to 'manipulate' you or get one up on you. You don't have to be even slightly paranoid to reach this conclusion; all you need is to be tired and anxious, which describes all of us at one time or other.

Later on, as baby turns into toddler and starts to learn the rules of life, it might well try to get its own way by any means possible. Tiny babies, though, are as capable of manipulating you as they are of playing snooker. Their needs are primal. They cannot survive without you. If you can rid yourself of all thoughts of manipulation, and just accept that for a while you are this baby's slave, you will be more relaxed and so better placed to solve baby's problems. Whereas if you believe baby is wrapping you around its little finger, you will be too busy thinking about this to solve baby's problems, which could make things worse.
 
Everyone has an opinion on this. Respond quickly to your baby's cries and clucking old busybody relatives will be sure to tell you that you are teaching the child 'bad habits'. They may even use the S-word. 'You spoil that child, you do.' Send these ancients on their way. If you want to teach a baby 'bad habits' the best way is to ignore it completely. Then it becomes clingy and attention-seeking or worse: it withdraws into itself, expecting nothing from anybody. Boys, for some reason, get more of this 'tough love', which does no one any good.
 

As it happens, it is literally impossible to spoil a baby. All but the most brutal childcare experts agree on this. Oh yes, you can buy too many toys for your baby, feed it foie gras and take it on holidays to the Bahamas, but none of this will make the smallest impact (other than the foie gras, which will give it the most appalling bellyache). Love and affection are what babies need, and virtually all they need, beyond the basics. You can never cuddle a baby too much. And all this matters most in the first weeks of its life. This is when the template is set, when the ways baby will respond to you and to the rest of humanity are to a great extent defined. To find out more, you can check out How To Deal With Baby Crying.

Why Do Babies Cry So Much At Night

Babies cry. There's no escaping it. Crying is their way of telling you that something is wrong. Desmond Morris in Babywatching lists seven main causes of crying: Pain, Discomfort, Hunger, Loneliness, Over-stimulation, Under-stimulation and Frustration. That's life for small babies. Their needs are few, but they are fundamental.

Why Do Babies Cry So Much At Night

Babies themselves cannot satisfy these needs. They cannot move, feed themselves, cover or uncover themselves, change their own nappies, open a window or turn off the CD player. So when they need something done they open their lungs and bawl for Britain. See that epiglottis wobble. Hear that noise in the next postal district. Run round the room like a headless chicken wondering what to do next.

Many mothers, who in previous centuries would have been identified as witches and burnt at the stake, claim to be able to tell the difference between all the various cries. Good for them. Sadly, no father I have ever heard of can do this. One or two claim they can, but they are the sort of men who do claim things.

There is no need to listen too closely to anything they say. Witchy mothers, then, can sort out their infant's problem within a few seconds, and go back to their cauldron. The rest of us panic and swear. Crying can erode the parental sanity; it can fracture relationships; it can turn neighbours into lifelong enemies, if your walls are thin enough. And that's the idea. Baby needs your attention. Crying that people notice is doing its job.

Morris's list is useful if incomplete. First, Pain. Babies may have internal pains as a result of the birth process; later on they may have colic or be teething (more of both shortly); later yet, when they start to move, they will start to bump and bash themselves. The pain cry is raw, and may even be aggrieved. Even to a tiny baby, pain can seem magnificently unjust. 'Why me?' the cry says. This is only the first of your child's questions that you won't be able to answer.

Discomfort usually means you have not changed the nappy since the last full moon. Look out for clues, such as a blinding smell of excrement, or nappy rash like second-degree burns. Maybe baby has a little indigestion. Did a breastfeeding mama eat curry last night? Everything goes into the breast milk, and from there into baby (a large glass of red wine often does wonders for a tired and gloomy mother, and for breastfeeding baby two or three hours later).

Hunger is straightforward. Give baby breast or bottle and all the world's problems are solved. To a small baby happiness is a warm nipple. 43 years later I feel the same about pizza: the programming hasn't failed me yet.

Loneliness is an interesting one. Are you reading the paper in the other room when you should be looking after baby? Of course you are. Babies start to feel insecure if left alone too long. They are social animals, who thrive on love and attention. Beware, too, of over-stimulation. This can mean many things: too many people in the room, music too loud, too many sharp and bright images on TV. Babies cannot process sensory information as adults can. (Some experts believe you should not let a child watch TV at all before the age of six months, and only sparingly before two years.) 

Under-stimulation and Frustration afflict slightly older babies. After six months or so babies can become bored with terrifying ease, until given a cardboard box to sit in. (Or you can turn on the TV.) Then they will cry with frustration as their desire to do something outstrips their ability to do it. It's tough being a baby.

Curiously Morris does not mention Tiredness, which I would have thought was every bit as important as the others. Very young babies go to sleep at will, but as they spend more of their days awake, they find it harder and harder to drop off. Sometimes a baby moves beyond sleep, into a region familiar to anyone who has found themselves watching Steven Seagal films on TV at 2.30 in the morning. A tired cry can be a pitiful thing to hear, so switch off the television this minute, and go to bed. To find out more, you can check out Why Do Babies Cry So Much At Night.

Baby Projectile Vomiting Reflux

VOMIT 

Piss is nothing. Shit can be managed. But vomit defeats the best of us. I was lucky: neither of my two threw up much. Some little ones barf by the hour. It's random and uncontrollable, and for a couple of months you too will walk around the house with a muslin constantly draped over one shoulder, just in case.

Baby Projectile Vomiting Reflux

The baby's stomach, like most of its internal organs, is not yet operating at full throttle. Unlike new cars, babies do not come already run in. They will ingest the customary titful of milk and then bring a certain percentage back up, often on the parental shoulder as you wind them. These vomblobs are known in the trade as "possets'. Muslins guard against possets. 

You are speaking a different language these days, one that has only tangential contact with English as you knew it before. Also you smell of sick a lot of the time. However careful you are, small blobs find their way onto every item of clothing you own.

After a while you don't even notice. Unfortunately everybody else does. Non-parents shake their heads with pity, and learn to hold their breath like synchronized swimmers. There is nothing you can do about any of this.
 
And it could be worse. You could have a projectile vomiter. My friend Georgia had one of these. He only P.V.ed ten or 15 times in three months, but each occasion would have won Oscars for special effects and cinematography. There was never any warning. Her son had glugged at the breast as usual. Then suddenly, a Linda Blair-like spray of milky spew would shoot out of his mouth. A fireman's hose couldn't have done a better job. If anyone had been sitting ten feet away, they would have been drenched. 

Georgia stopped going out. It was too dangerous. She never knew when he might strike. Restaurants were an impossibility. It would have been like dining with her own miniature Mr Creosote. Even going to the shops to buy a pint of milk was fraught with peril. This was in the depths of winter, so she would wrap him up in half a dozen layers, wrap herself up in half a dozen layers, strap him in the sling, put the sling on, get to the door, feel the fireman's hose of vomit hit her chest, stand still for a moment, scream, bang her head against the wall a couple of times, go back inside, take all his and her clothes off and wash them both and shove everything in the washing machine, put more clothes on and start the whole process all over again. By the time she reached the shop she had forgotten why she was going there.

Projectile vomiters have their uses. As pure spectacle they are remarkable. If by some fluke you can get them to do it to order, you could sell them to a circus. Or go to a party and aim your vomiter at someone you don't like. Or put on some roller skates, strap your vomiter to your back facing away from you, and use him or her as a jet pack. Projectile vomiting is an infant reflex, and like the others it is gone after three months. You might as well make the most of it while you can. To find out more, you can check out Baby Projectile Vomiting Reflux.