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Taking care of a newborn is hard enough, and it becomes even harder when your baby screams all day, but there doesn’t seem to be a direct cause for it. When you’ve eliminated hunger, dirty diapers, temperature, illness and injury, it is very easy to feel at a loss. Welcome to life with a colicky baby, AKA my life. Well, until this past week anyway.

The Mayo Clinic defines colic as ‘Colic is a frustrating condition marked by predictable periods of significant distress in an otherwise well-fed, healthy baby. Babies with colic often cry more than three hours a day, three days a week for three weeks or longer. Nothing you do to try to help your baby during these episodes seems to bring any relief.’

Poor Baby G was crying like he was in so much pain, but very little would calm him down completely! It is very hard to see your baby screaming to the point where they have real tears. He was overtired and only taking cat naps during the day and having a long deep sleep at night (which I really won’t ever complain about, the sleep was welcomed and definitely needed!). I will always say that you can handle anything during the day as long as you got a full night’s sleep!

Even though we’ve currently seemed to have surpassed the peak of G’s colic, it is still exhausting. A screaming baby is hard to enjoy, and it’s hard to get anything done when your baby is screaming all day!

We eventually attributed G’s displeasure to a gas buildup, while colic does have an exact cause, this was something we could grab on to and find a solution to!

Here’s what we did in efforts to relieve G’s colic:

⁃ warm baths (sometimes twice a day)

⁃ Burping him a lot, in various positions

⁃ Walking around rocking him

⁃ Time in his swing

⁃ Naked time

⁃ Warm cloth on belly at diaper changes

⁃ Baby massage before bed

⁃ Bicycling legs

⁃ Sound machine app, Sleeptot

While all of these were helpful, the thing that actually made the huge difference for us was:

⁃ switching to an anti-colic bottle

Philips Avent Anti-Colic BPA Free Baby bottle, 9-Ounce, 3-pack, SCF563/37

We switched to the Philips Avent Anti-Colic Bottles and wow did we see a difference in just a few days! After weeks of struggling, all we needed was a bottle that prevented a large number of bubbles to be formed while your baby is feeding! G has been so easy to burp and barely has any gas since switching to these bottles! The other positive to these bottles is that they work with my breast pump and now that G isn’t screaming and required to be in arms all day, I’ll actually have time to make a stash of pumped milk (as G is combo BF/F fed).

Now we are able to enjoy our baby, because he actually spends time awake and happy now, it’s an amazing feeling! We do still have nightly meltdowns, but it’s nothing compared to what it was, so I’ll take it!

Mamas! Have you dealt with colic? What worked to calm down your baby?

Until next time,

Amanda, xo.