On Saturday (2nd August) we had a marathon colic session – 8 hours worth from 2 to 10pm… It wasn’t solid crying, thankfully: Conrad seemed to start to settle and drift off in-between, but if he got stirred the slightest it started all over again. Most of the time nothing I tried would help, until just before 7pm, when I held him across my lap and jiggled him using very fast, small movements.
At that point, Conrad’s aunt Wendy arrived with her boyfriend Graham, as they’d agreed to babysit for Ian and I while we went down to a local pub to meet up with our friends Richard and Cara for our first evening out together in a very long time (and my first alcoholic drink since getting pregnant with Conrad…!). Conrad drifted off in my arms while I was chatting to Wendy and Graham, but unfortunately as soon as I went to put him in his cot, he stirred and started to cry again…
I had another couple of attempts but it seemed impossible for me to settle him for the night. Wendy offered to give it a go so that Ian and I could go and meet our friends and we left Conrad in her capable hands. When we came back around three hours later, Wendy told us that Conrad had cried on and off for another 45 minutes but then fallen asleep in her arms, in the sofa in front of the telly. “Hustle (TV series) seems to do the trick!”, she told us.
From being so exhausted, I would assume, Conrad slept really well the rest of the night and a good chunk into the morning – waking for his feeds every three hours but then going straight back to sleep, which meant I got a bit more sleep than usual too. Then the following night he wasn’t colicky at all – seems he must have done two nights’ worth in one go… Yesterday (Monday 4 August) evening he was colicky for his more usual 4 hours, from 4 to 8pm, and drank lots of formula. As he started to nod off I fell asleep briefly holding him on the sofa and when I woke up about 15 minutes later he was sound asleep, so I put him in bed, which he didn’t seem to notice. The rest of the night he slept in 4-hour chunks and woke up for his feeds at 12.15 and 4.30am. I’m not expecting him to start sleeping through the night just yet, but at least he seems to be able to go for that little bit longer already.
There is some advice that one can start a bedtime routine at this age (or even earlier), but we have decided to leave that until Conrad’s colic has passed (that is, if it happens within the next couple of months – it could of course take longer, which would mean we’d reevaluate things a bit).
Gabriella