It worked! It WORKED! For the last 9 weeks I have been living in newborn HELL. I love my babies but the constant screaming has brought me to my breaking point and JUST when I felt like I couldn’t handle one more day…it changed. I told you guys I started the lactase drops and we noticed improvement only for him to catch a cold and go right back into misery. Andy and I were on a walk this week and I just looked at him and said “what do we do if this doesn’t work?” I mean truly, we are out of options. We’ve tried everything short of reflux meds (which we refuse to use for many reasons) and nothing has worked. We were actually considering hiring full-time help to get us through the next few months if his crying continued. We were both teetering on the line of a real breakdown. But then… it happened. He woke up one day and was happy and then he woke up from his next nap and was happy again and again. These are the moments I have only heard about. I’ve never actually experienced having a sweet little baby who only cries when he needs something. I had no idea how much more enjoyable having a baby would be if I wasn’t constantly trying to find out what was wrong.
Of course, like I said, right after we saw the tables starting to turn he caught his first cold. I have always been terrified of a newborn getting a cold but it honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought. Besides being slightly terrified it would turn into something worse, it was mostly just a lot of sucking snot, fussing and checking on him throughout the night and cranking up the humidifier. He was certainly fussier during the first few days but once the worst of it wore off he was back to being much happier than before. I can’t pretend like everything is just rainbows and butterflies, though, in fact he’s actually sleeping worse than before. He went from sleeping 6 to 9 hour stretches to waking up 15 to 20 times a night. We have decided, with the guidance of our night nurse, to wean him off his paci use at night. We were using his paci at night to try to stretch him between feeds but it ended up biting us in the butt. Now every time his paci falls out he wakes up and wants it back in his mouth. I’ve heard over and over again babies have a better chance of putting themselves back to sleep if they wake up in the same condition they fell asleep in. That’s why it’s recommended you don’t rock a baby to sleep because if they wake up in a bassinet, especially one that’s not moving, they won’t be happy! So, maybe it’s bad timing to start the paci weaning since he JUST got happy but I know he can’t go on like this. No one could be happy waking up that many times a night! We’re going to let him use it until he gets really sleepy but pop it out once he’s almost asleep and we will stop giving it back to him in the middle of the night. Once the habit is broken we’ll be able to let him use it a bit more often.
Overall, despite the rough nights, my baby is HAPPY. Wow. It is a real miracle. I feel so, so blessed that we were able to figure out what was going on. My little boy didn’t deserve to suffer like this and I’m so happy he won’t have to anymore!!!