Pages

8/12/2015

About Growth Spurts

When Jacob was a week old, we had a night that really threw us for a loop. He would not calm down or be consoled, no matter what we tried. He started fussing and crying around nine o'clock and kept going off and on until about two or three in the morning. It was exhausting for us because he just would not stop. And it was exhausting for him because he barely slept at all during that time.

We tried everything we could to calm him down and stay calm ourselves. We tried holding him. Nursing him. Burping him. Checking his diaper. Swaddling him. Putting him in his little chair with the vibrations. Nursing him again. Putting him in his swing. Holding him again. Walking him around. Singing.

At one point, I thought I had him finally settled. My husband came up to me, sitting in our big chair in the living room, and asked me what I'd done. I'd tearfully sung the only song I could think of and remember the words to at two o'clock in the morning. The ABCs. And I probably sung the song twenty times before Jacob finally settled down in my arms.

Of course, a few minutes later, he started wailing all over again.

My husband wanted to give me a break so he decided to try taking Jacob outside. He seemed to like all of the outside noise - the breeze in the tree limbs overhead, the hum of the bugs. I walked around the patio singing to him. My husband held him in his arms. That didn't work, either, and we definitely didn't want to wake the neighbors with a crying baby outside in the middle of the night.

To get back inside, my husband had to carry Jacob through the laundry room. Before he made it all the way into the house, Jacob's crying stopped. My husband and I both froze in our tracks. We realized immediately what it was.

The sound of our HVAC. It was like a giant white noise machine. So my husband did two things. One, he got Jacob's little chair, propped it on top of the washing machine, and hung out with him in the laundry room while he slept. Then, first thing in the morning, he ordered a white noise machine on Amazon and paid extra for same-day delivery.

The following day, Jacob slept a lot (we figured he was probably exhausted) and things returned to normal. In the meantime, I got on my iPad and started Googling. Come to find out... it was probably his one week growth spurt. It was the only thing that would explain why our previously super-calm baby had gone all Jekyll and Hyde on us.

All of my Google research said that babies commonly have growth spurts around 1 week, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks... And I'll be damned if we haven't had the same kind of experience with Jacob right on the dot for each one. They haven't been as bad as the first one, because at least we have kind of known when to look out for them. I guess our next one is probably going to be around 12 weeks, which means it's just around the corner!

Has your little one had a rough time with growth spurts? What have your experiences been like?


No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting!