I was over at Cardiogirl’s place, reading her thoughts on the cover story of OK! Magazine featuring 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears and her new baby daughter. Apparently Miss Spears thinks having a baby is a piece of cake. HA. It is to laugh. I agree with Cardiogirl and her annoyance with the situation. Shame on that magazine for glamorizing once again teen pregnancy and choosing to perpetuate the myth of fall-right-into easy (early! single!!) motherhood and child rearing. (you know my story of teenage pregnancy, you can find it HERE) Even in the best circumstances, having a baby and raising a child is about as tough as it gets.
I started thinking about when I had Max. I was WAY older, and way married, and even then there were times when I just thought, no, I’m not going to make it through this one, I have no bloody idea what the hell to do. I recall one evening, Max must have been about three months. He’d been cranky for a little while, and we changed him and got him a bottle. His daddy fed him, I sat next to him on the sofa, watching and basking in mommy bliss. Well. That child sucked down the bottle as fast as I’d ever seen a baby do. We had about thirteen seconds of the mommy and daddy and baby bliss, and then the boy let out an earthshattering noise, like he was belching up a cow. Well, not a cow exactly, but the whole bottle. The whole everloving bottle. A true Linda Blair moment. Followed by a bad sitcom moment. There was formula EVERYWHERE. Chuck’s eyebrows were dripping. My shirt was soaked. There was formula soaking into the carpet, pooling under the lamp, making a weird mural on the wall. OMG. We sat stunned, time out of balance for a millisecond, then sprinted into cleaning mode.
Ugh.This was our introduction to about six weeks of colic, don’tcha know. Every evening about 10 PM, Max would wake and begin screaming. We would do everything we could think of; we gave him those drops (my child ingested more Mylicon…), put him in the bouncy chair, on top of the washer, we drove him around, we rubbed his tummy, we tickled his back, we stopped giving him regular and started soy formula, three different kinds. Nothing. Helped. Nothing. He would wake up and cry, non-stop, 10 PM until 1 AM, then plop exhausted into the crib. Then wake up starving again five-ish, like nothing ever happened. I think it was just his digestive system getting attuned to working, and most kids go through it, more or less. We did the colic dance for about six weeks until he literally grew out of it. Let’s see if OK will do a followup on Jamie Lynn and her purported non-screaming, non-crying infant during the Nights of Colic. Now, I’d really like a cover story on that.
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