Colic

We've had a pretty easy time of things so far with Seren, relatively speaking. She's a good baby, and sleeps a fair bit throughout the day. When it got to the evening she developed a 'waking period' pattern, where she would be pretty vocal and fuss a bit between around 10pm and 2am, but eventually she would fall asleep again and wake every few hours for a feed. Manageable.

She's a month old today, and we've noticed some changes over the past few weeks. She's becoming more alert during the day, and actually sleeping for longer uninterrupted spells during the night. We even had to wake her a couple of times because she's been so long without a feed. (I guess there are different views about whether we should do this or not, but the advice we're following says that at this age they shouldn't go for longer than 5 hours without feeding. We've discovered that there's a lot of conflicting advice out there though!)

Well, last night that all changed. In fact the signs were there the night before, but not quite as severe. We were out for most of the afternoon and she did well, sleeping for most of the time. We got home and she woke for a bit. A little later around dinner time she started to get a little ratty, which developed very quickly into a full-on wailing marathon. She was uncontrollable from about 5:30 until midnight, when she eventually gave in...and slept until 7am! We'd been reading up on colic and had hoped that this might have passed her by, but we suspect that's what's happened. We're resigning ourselves to the fact that we might be in for a long phase of difficult evenings. Some of the advice we've read suggest swaddling the baby to make them feel more secure and control their flailing arms and legs. I also tried one of the colic holding positions (which came fairly naturally, but I noticed it in a book Cristina had sent Laura on breastfeeding) and it seems to comfort her, so that's my secret weapon. It's the only thing that seems to calm her. We'll see how it goes tonight, strange that it only seems to affect them in the evenings, and we'll probably give the health visitor a call on Monday to see what she thinks.