Baby Woes: Surviving colic

Once again, let me preface this edition of "baby woes" with the disclaimer that I AM MADLY IN LOVE WITH MY BABY! I love everything about being a mom. The vent that follows is just to inform people that sometimes parenthood can be rough and if they're going through a similar experience, they are not alone.

That being said, colic sucks. Really really sucks. To the point where booting the baby out of the house seems like a really good idea. Baby D had colic. Hers was in the evening. Which was probably hormonal and related to the fact that I had major baby blues in the evening during the first two weeks. But that's another blog post.

For the first few weeks of life, Baby D just slept, pooped, and ate. It was pretty great, actually. We just cuddled her, and if she cried, we fed her or changed her diaper and she was content again.

But at some point after a few weeks, she started having these horrible screaming fits at night. NOTHING helped. Not swaddling, not feeding, not changing her diaper. We tried rocking her. We tried bouncing her. Putting her in the swing. Re-swaddling her. Singing to her. Trying to change her diaper again. Offering her a pacifier (which I swore I would never do). Trying to see if maybe NOW she was hungry. Holding her silently. Holding her and talking to her. Checking her diaper again. Seeing if she was ready for the pacifier yet. Running the vaccuum... you get the point.

NOTHING WORKED.

We are not supporters of crying it out, so we would just take turns holding her while she cried. After a few hours, it would stop. We would breathe a sigh of relief and tiptoe around the house in fear of awakening the beast. (Just an expression, I do not think my daughter is a beast. If shw were a beast, however, she would be the cutest flipping beast of all time!)

Finally one night it didn't happen any more. Now it seems like it all happened so long ago. It's funny, though. I wished those times away so many times when they were happening. Now, I wish I hadn't done that! She has grown so long, and I am so short, that she barely fits into my lap anymore - and she's only 4 1/2 months old! Back during the screaming fits, I could lean back and just hold her against my chest and try to cuddle the cries out of her. Now she is already too big for "chesty time," as we called it. It's downright sad sometimes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if you have come across this blog and you are dealing with a colic-y baby, I promise you the tears will stop. Baby D hasn't cried more than 5 minutes at a time for several weeks now. So try (impossible as it might be) to enjoy those times. When you are up in the middle of the night and all you can think is "I wish I could put this baby down without her crying so I can get some sleep!," try to enjoy the time you have holding that little baby! Because you can never get those moments back.

The upside to passing those moments by is that you get to trade them in for smiles, coos, babbles and (not for us yet) laughs. While I miss my tiny baby, this big baby is awesome too! Every time I get sad over a stage ending, a new amazing one begins. Let's just remember to cherish them ALL!

My eye got really watery today at work during my planning period (no students). I kept wiping it, annoyed.

When my next class came in, one of my students said "What is wrong with your eye?!" I shrugged and told her it had been watering. "You've got pink eye!" she told me (well, actually she said "You got pink eye!" We're still working on the grammar. Yes, I teach 8th grade). I told her it was just watery.

Within half an hour, another student said my eye was swollen. I had no mirror but managed to peek into the metal part of my stapler and sure enough, it was. By the time my next class entered, my eye was pouring goop.

I went to see the school nurse after school and her and another staff member confirmed that I had pink eye. Fabulous. I've never had this before, and it's the last day of school before Christmas vacation! Nooooo!

I went to one of those pharmacy walk-ins and got some eye drops. The most devastating part of this is throwing away all of my eye makeup. I never buy expensive makeup, but I splurged two weeks ago and bought a $20 eye shadow - trashed.

Now my eye won't stop gooping shut. This is gross.

My embarassing afternoon

I'm a teacher at a middle school. One of the substitutes also serves as the girl's basketball coach. Since he's a sub, he doesn't have his own room. He asked me a couple of months ago if he could use my room after school for study hall before basketball practice (woah, say that ten times fast) - something all athletes have to do. I said of course!

On Wednesdays, he told me, they would not be using my room. This is good, because Wednesdays in our district are "short days" - the kids get out an hour early so we can have professional development. I pump at work (breast milk, that is). On Wednesdays, I get 20 minutes for lunch, and after several weeks of rushing my students down to the cafeteria, grabbing my lunch, rushing back to my class, setting up my pump, pumping, taking it apart and cleaning it, taking my milk to the fridge, and picking my kids back up - I cracked. I said NO MORE! And stopped pumping at lunch on Wednesdays. Now, I pump after school before our meetings.

I hate being late for the meetings though, so I usually pump and then leave my milk in a storage bag and my pump parts out, cleaning them after the meeting. Less rushing that way, you know.

So today I went about my routine. Pumped after school, put the milk in a storage bag (this is probably so gross to people who don't have kids, sorry, I swear my entire blog is not about boobs and milk), and left my empty bottles and suction cups sitting on my desk, without washing them.

Well, when I got done with my meeting, I went into my classroom to discover not only did this male substitute take the girls' basketball team into my class after all, but he had brought the boys' team as well. I was mortified, knowing my stuff had been sitting out in the open. Then I went to my desk and saw that the substitute had CLEANED IT UP!

My nipple shields (the suction cups) and milk-drop covered bottles had been cleared off my desk and put into my pump bag, and my sack of milk had been placed in there as well. I am so completely mortified. I mumbled something like, "Oh, gee, sorry about the mess...." And he didn't say ANYTHING. Which made it way more awkward.

Lesson learned: clean up my disgusting used breast pump parts RIGHT AWAY.