Am I Screwing Up Because I Don't Have a Baby Book Started, and Other Musings on Parental Life

Although, I guess this blog is sort of an electronic baby book...I don't have a changing table either, and that is proving to be a bit inconvenient. I had no clue I would be changing 20 diapers a day and that my child would take great delight in peeing and pooing as soon as her diaper was removed.

Laurel has the Colic. Or at least something that caused her to cry fitfully for many hours last night. Up to this point, running through the checklist (diaper, gas, milk, tired, just-want-to-be-held) has been pretty effective in keeping her cries to a minimum. Last night, she could not be consoled, which is why I found myself standing in the hallway, running the hair dryer at 1:30 AM while M held a swaddled Laurel, bouncing and swinging her.

It worked, and two desperately tired new parents crawled into bed a short while later. We were following the hints from The Happiest Baby on the Block. According to Harvey Karp, babies are born too soon. The first few months is the "fourth trimester" in which they pine for the warm ambiance of the womb. The womb is a warm, cozy place where baby is rocked back and forth gently all day and hears a constant, very loud swishing sound of circulating blood. To have a non-crying newborn, you replicate these sensory experiences.

Tonight, we rigged up the sound machine and she's currently sleeping very peacefully listening to the "wind" setting. It reminds me of a night we spent on the A.T. in New Hampshire after a very hard day of hiking. Rocky trail and wet conditions made it slow going that day and we barely did 8 miles. We spent the night in a shelter next to a rushing creek with two Canadians. We played cribbage and I rested my knee, which I had smashed while crawling over a boulder that day. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and the wind was blowing very hard. I thought, "New Hampshire is the wildest place I have ever been." But I felt warm and snug inside the shelter, and only a little bit afraid.

What is Laurel thinking tonight, as she drifts in and out of baby sleep? Does she miss the uterus? Does she remember it? How does my voice sound compared to what it did when she was inside? What is it like to think without words? Ah, the mysteries of a newborn...