My baby SUCKS

How'd ya like to spend all day looking at a mug like that?

Before Milo was born, I voraciously read every single baby book I could get my hands on. I didn't want to dealing with any surprises with my newborn. Oh, no - I wanted to be prepared.

The more I read, I thought, the better I'd be at identifying any issues or problems that arose with the baby and knowing how to neutralize them. Is the baby having trouble eating? Easily resolved! Simply consult pages 85-97 in book A and pages 112-136 in book B and all your problems will be over! Having trouble getting the baby to sleep through the night? Tut, tut, not to worry - pages 53-89 in Book C and pages 94-127 in Book D will have your baby counting sheep in no time!

After arming myself with a mountain of book learning, I figured I was ready for whatever my baby would throw at me. "Bring it on," I thought, fancying myself to be like Neo in The Matrix after he'd had the kung fu program plugged into his brain. "I know babies!"

An expecting parent's cluelessness knows no bounds...

Ever since Milo was a couple of weeks old, I've been fighting to get him to behave the way the books suggest a "proper" baby should. According to conventional wisdom, a baby under three months old SHOULD...

• Eat every three hours
  
  
• Be fed off a different boob for each meal (according to some; others say that a baby should go for 20 minutes on the first boob, then for long as he or she wants on the second, then start on the second for the next meal. Still others say you should feed on one boob for five minutes, then the next for 20 minutes, then back to the first if the baby's still hungry. Confused? Lord, tell me about it.)
  
  
• Be finished his/her feed within 30 minutes
  
  
• Have four-five naps a day, each lasting for at least an hour
  
  
• Always be put down to sleep while still slightly awake
  
  
• NEVER be awake for longer than 60-90 minutes at a stretch
  
  
• NEVER be given a breast right before naptime or bedtime (for fear of the breast becoming a "prop" - something the baby NEEDS in order to fall asleep)
  
  
• NEVER be rocked or walked to sleep - again for fear of forming bad prop-reliant habits
  
  
• NEVER be allowed to nap in a stroller or car (PROPS! PROPS!)
  

Well. With all due respect to the experts, who have reached their conclusions after working with dozens, if not hundreds, of babies and MUST know what they're talking about, they haven't met Milo.

For weeks, I laboured under the belief that I had a difficult, colicky, chronically peeved, truly Satanic child. Milo seemed to spend all his waking hours fussing and crying - unless there was a boob in his mouth to plug him up. If he was awake, he was miserable. Needless to say, I tried to arrange it so that all my friends would drop by to visit him while he was asleep. "Oh, what a darling angel!" they'd cry, seeing how peaceful he looked. "Um, yeah, right," I'd agree nervously, all the while thinking, "He's going to wake up soon - leave! Quickly!"

During each feed, Milo would pull away from the boob several times, look up at me and promptly start crying. It was like he feared my milk would poison him, as if he thought I was the reincarnation of the person who had murdered him in a previous life - and man, was he pissed to see me again.

I debated changing his name to Stewie after the matricidal baby on The Family Guy. At one point I even used the magnifying glass on the baby nail clippers we have to make sure that the stork bites on the back of his head don't actually read, "666." I half-expected him rotate his head in a full circle and then projectile puke pea-green vomit all over me.

To me, Milo's constant fussing and crying just seemed so... unfair.** I did yoga and meditated nearly every damned day of my pregnancy, firmly believing that by doing so, I'd be awarded with an angelic little Buddha baby whose shakras were all perfectly aligned. (Heh.)

Then, once he'd made his way into the world, I did everything the books told me to - or at least, I tried to. I set up a three-hour feeding schedule, and stuck to it like meconium poop on a cloth diaper. I offered him the boob every day at 7:00, 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, and 7:00, just like clockwork. And after he'd been awake for an hour or so (fussing and crying for most of it), I'd put him to bed, still awake, (and fussing and crying, more often than not). I'd then spend the entire time I'd allotted for his nap trying to soothe him into sleep. I spent more time bent over his crib patting his back and "shushing" him than HE did actually sleeping in it!

To make matters worse, when I'd get up to feed Milo in the wee hours of the night, he'd often keep me up for two, sometimes even three hours at a time. I'd feed him, burp him (or at least try to), change his diaper, then change his diaper AGAIN because he'd just pooped very loudly in his fresh one, and then spend an hour or so trying to settle back down to sleep. I developed a permanent eye twitch. My hair started falling in clumps. Huge, gaping ulcers started forming in my stomach.

Well, no, not really, but given the stress I was feeling, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had.

Frantic for a solution, I reread every baby book on my shelf, desperate for a cure to this problem. Surely Milo's constant fussing must be caused by some sort of physical ailment, I thought. It had to be gas, or reflux, or maybe gas AND reflux. Maybe he was constantly too hot or too cold. Or maybe he had some sort of invisible itchy rash all over his body that was driving him crazy. There had to be SOME sort of explanation. It couldn't possibly be... his personality. My blood would run cold as I'd envision Milo as a 16-year-old malcontent, reaching the culmination of his miserable, angry life by charging into his school with a couple of semi-automatic machine guns and blowing away his classmates.

Yikes.

I finally shared my concerns about Milo with Terrylyn, our midwife, and she offered me an incredibly simple solution. After weighing and measuring him and discovering that he's above the 100th percentile for his height (25 1/2 inches) but only in the 50th-75th percentile for his weight (around 12 lbs), she suggested I feed him more. He was getting enough food to be healthy, she said, but because he was growing so quickly in length, he probably had a really fast metabolism (just like his incredibly tall and slender dad) and would benefit from eating larger, more frequent meals.

And so, with hope in my heart and guilt in my gut, I abandoned the advice of the baby gurus and started feeding Milo whenever he became inconsolably fussy. He went from eating every three hours to eating every two hours - sometimes every 90 minutes - and I'd let him go as long as he wanted on both boobs each time. I even started drinking a special herbal tea with fennel and blessed thistle in it, in order to boost my milk supply.

And oh, the difference it has made! Seems there WAS a physical cause behind all of Milo's fussing and feuding: he was HUNGRY! Despite all my best efforts, I was letting my baby down in the most obvious possible way - I simply wasn't feeding him enough. Oh, I thought I was - I was feeding him every three hours or so and letting him go for as long as he wanted on a boob. I thought I was doing exactly what the books told me to do. And since it was always him who ended the feed by pulling away from my boob and crying, I thought that was a pretty obvious sign that he was full.

Um, nope.

It turns out I have a fast letdown with my milk - in the morning, at least. This means that the milk comes out of me so thick and fast that it makes it difficult for Milo to swallow it all. He wasn't pulling away from me because he was full or being poisoned or simply angry at being alive, he was doing it to keep himself from choking. And in the midst of all his crying and sputtering, he'd end up swallowing a fair amount of air, which caused him to have painful gas, which made it even more difficult for him to get enough to eat. So when I thought he'd finished a feed, he was really only halfway done. And once the gas had finally worked its way through him (usually escaping in the form of an incredibly loud, explosive fart), he'd be ready to eat again - but by that time, I'd have closed up shop and wouldn't let him have another go at the boob for three more hours.

But now that I'm allowing Milo to eat more often and have longer feeds, he's a much more content little boy. GO FIGURE. He sleeps much better now and will go for 10-11 hours with only one wake-up and then will go straight back to sleep once he's done eating (though I fear he'll never be much of a daytime napper, alas).

And what's more important, he's HAPPY after he's finished a meal. Instead of screaming and crying all day long, he wriggles and babbles and coos. He now looks into my face with wonder and contemplation instead of anger and frustration, and is content to be sit in his bouncy chair for 15-30 minutes at a time - which is wonderful, because it gives me time to do things like eat a bowl of cereal and go to the bathroom, and it also encourages him to learn how to entertain himself. Of course, his idea of entertainment at this point is kicking his legs and staring at the curtains or the Haida killer whale print we've got on our wall, but hey, whatever works.

He still hasn't smiled at me yet - I mean, REALLY smiled at me, in a way that has me certain he's thinking, "Hey, boob lady! I'm having fun hangin' wid ya!" but I know that will come in time (and just a couple of weeks ago, I wasn't sure...). We're taking baby steps here, but we'll get to our goal eventually.

So yes, it's true: my baby sucks - all day, every day, as long and as often as he wants to. Whatever makes him happy, makes ME happy. Oh sure, all his constant feeding has left me with practically no time for myself (or, say, this blog), and I do still worry about the precedents we're setting by not following the strict feeding and sleeping guidelines set out by the baby experts. I'm sure there will be a price to pay later on, but right now, for the first time, I'm really enjoying all the time I'm spending with Milo. And I wouldn't mess with that for the world.

** To be honest, Milo didn't REALLY cry every single minute he wasn't on the boob. Just most of them. If you asked Milo's grandparents, they would all tell you that he wasn't NEARLY as bad as I'm making him out to be. Truth be told, ALL newborn babies cry an average of an hour a day, and Milo probably didn't cry much more than that. But when it's YOUR baby, each minute of crying seems like an hour in itself, especially when you don't know WHY he's crying or what you can do to make him or her happy. It's the trial by fire that all new parents must go through, I guess, in order to build up enough scar tissue to last them through the next 18 years...